LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, 

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



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THE NEW INTERPRETATION 



THE SCRIPTURES VIEWED IN THE EIGHT OF 



Christian Science. 



SERMON 




IGTO^' 



GEO. B. DAY, 

PASTOR OF THE CHURCH OF CHRIST, (SCIENTIST), 
CHICAGO. 



Published by O. M. PARSONS, 

No. 3015 Groveland Ave., Chicago. 

1889. 






THB LIBRARY 
i OF C ONGR ESS 
LHASjHINGTON 



-E 



94 3 



ZD$ 



COPYRIGHT. 

GEO. B. DAY, 
1889. 



CONTENTS. 

PAGE, 

Robert Elsmere, . . . . . 5 

Omnipotance of Faith, , . . 18 

The Good is All, ... 29 

Origin of Evil, .......... 39 

Death Abolished, .......... 49 

The True axd The False I. 59 

The Saixts Were Saved, . 70 

Justification by Faith, S2 

Heaven, 90 

The Eucharist, 100 

The Reign of Six axd The Reigx of 

Righteousness Contrasted. 112 



ROBERT ELSMERE. 



Wherefore henceforth know we no man after the 
flesh: Tea, though we have k?iown Christ after the 
flesh, yet now henceforth know we him no more, — 2d Cor. 

' r., 16. 

The attention of the religious world has been recently 
directed to two singular books of very different character, 
though classed alike as religious publications. " Science 
and Health," by Mrs. Eddy, is purely abstract, and pur- 
ports to state clearly the highest truth of being. The 
author, like Carlyle, believes her thought to be much in 
advance of the age. There are few of the clergy, how- 
ever, in America, who have not read at least parts of it. 
Some commend, others denounce, but the major part 
dissuade their flocks from its perusal, and affect to believe 
that its influence will be transient. It has reached its 
thirty-seventh edition. The other book is a novel. Its 
author is a Mrs. Ward, of England. " Robert Elsmere" 
is the name of this remarkable work which is having an 
unprecedented sale, mostly in this country, through the free 
advertising of the pulpit. The orthodox clergy are of one 
mind in denouncing it. The Unitarian ministers, together 
with some of the regular sects, who are independent in 
thought, have no fear of its influence on the universal 
Christian faith and even commend it. The hero of the 



6 ROBERT ELSMERE. 

story is introduced as a young Oxford student, of orthodox 
education and belief. Elsmere is talented, ardent and 
scholarly. He is ordained a priest and seeks a parish where 
he may devote his energy and talent to the work of the 
established church. He is early united in marriage to a 
woman who is one of the purest and most self-sacrificing 
types of her sex. Bound to her husband by the most loyal 
devotion, she is, however, rigid and unswerving in her 
allegiance to the forms and standards of the establishment. 
Educated by a father who was almost an ascetic and 
whose view of life was narrow and puritanical, Catherine 
Elsmere could not see right or goodness, save within the 
restricted lines drawn for her by this parent who had loved 
and trusted her above all others. Through the gift of 
Squire Wendover, Elsmere became rector of a country 
church, and for a brief period was happy in unremitting 
labors in the pulpit and parish of his choice. He preached 
faithfully and with the assistance of his wife administered 
to the wants of the poor and ignorant. The Squire, who 
was of infirm health, selfish and egotistical, was neverthe- 
less a scholar of the highest modern type. His library 
was filled with the rarest and costliest treasures, and he 
himself was the author of a work which embodied the 
results of the latest thought and research. Like many 
others of the modern thinkers he seems to have been filled 
with malice toward all established religious beliefs, and the 
aim of his study was evidently to overthrow the founda- 
tions of Christianity. The Squire and his rector met at the 
first to experience a mutual repulsion. This subsequently 
changed to an esteem, each for the other, growing out of 
a common love of books and thought. Elsmere was led 
by the study of his patron's most important work, to inves- 
tigate the evidences of the gospel narrative; came at last 



ROBERT ELSMERE. / 

to doubt its historical realities; gave up his belief in the 
miracles of the bible and lost confidence in the doctrine of 
the Divinity of Jesus the Christ. Conscientious to the last 
degree, the rector did not long hesitate. After consulting 
the one college professor in whose integrity and honesty 
he had most confidence, he confided to his wife his purpose 
to resign his rectorship and preach no longer under the 
auspices of the church. Catherine hears his determination 
with horror, and silently submits to the new life opening 
before her, but with protests in every fiber of her soul. 
The former rector soon finds himself in London seeking 
work among the poor and the most irreligious of its popu- 
lous corners. The way opens. He is brought into con- 
tact with the atheists, the socialists and the anarchists. He 
preaches Jesus as the man of courage, faith, and the ardent 
lover of his fellows. By his eloquence and fervid rhetoric, 
his devotion and unflinching courage, his purity and self 
devotion, he conquers the bitter misanthrope, thescurrillous 
demagogue, and the rampant enemies of religion and 
society. He founds and builds up a church of humanity. 
His wife becomes also a partial convert to the religion which 
has for its basis a human Jesus and not a divine Christ. 

These two books, the one an abstract presentation of 
the highest truth, the other a novel, as we have said, are 
strirring up the animosity of multitudes of the American 
clergy, and yet, singularly enough, both are written by 
women. Can it be that the feminine thought is about to 
change the current of faith, and force the beliefs of men 
into new channels? 

We are sure that the fears of honest clergymen are 
groundless, The doctrine of the divinity of Jesus and a 
belief in his miracles, have too firm a hold on the mind of 
Christendom ever to be dislodged by argument, or over- 



8 ROBERT ELSMERE. 

thrown bv any evidence whatever. 

The story of the gospels came at a time when the 
faith of men was ready to receive it. The world had 
waited for it. The immaculate conception of Jesus; His 
precocity in wisdom when a child; His marvelous under- 
standing in riper years, unaided by tuition or association 
with the learned and thoughtful; His marvelous gift of 
healing and His power over material nature; His senten- 
tious utterances of the highest spiritual truth ; His unde- 
served sufferings at the hands of bigoted and malicious 
pietists; His violent death; His resurrection and final dis- 
appearance from human sight, are the elements of a story 
which crept into the faith of the world, because it served 
to solve the problems of being, which no philosophy or 
speculation of preceding times could solve. Men had lost 
all faith in mythologic legends. They had wearied of the 
theories of the origin and destiny of man and his world, 
which were incapable of proof or demonstration. 

This Jesus of Nazareth was enthroned as the 
world's teacher in place of rabbi, doctor, or philosopher. 
He taught righteousness by illustration, power over evil 
by demonstration, and immortality by opening the way 
and entering himself, bidding men follow Him. As little 
as He was understood, the human mind perceived that He 
knew the mystery of being and the secret of God and the 
universe. Long ago — centuries in the past — failing in 
their apprehension of the Christ thought, the human world 
gave up all speculation and original thought and threw 
itself blindly, but trustingly, into the hands of its Jesus. 
It clothed Him with omnipotence, invested him with 
supreme control of souls, and it continues to-day to seek 
His favor, believing, if that is once secured, an eternal des- 
tiny of bliss is certain. 



ROBERT ELSMERE. 9 

This investiture of Jesus with almightiness in the 
mind of Christendom is its precious doctrine of the 
" Divinity of Christ." The facts in his earthly life, upon 
which the universal trust reposes, is the doctrine of mira- 
cles* They cannot be separated, because they are more 
intimately related than cause and effect. They are one 
and the same. That indefinable thought called divinity 
could not be if miracles were not, and miracles are not 
miracles, if Jesus is not divine. Both are thoughts, and 
one can not be obliterated without the destruction of the 
other. To those who desire perpetuity of conscious exist- 
ence and future happiness, these so-called doctrines are 
essential. They are in the present condition of thought in 
the civilized world the only basis of eternal hope. No 
one but a fatalist or a disciple of the decayed Greek 
thought would attempt to undermine or destroy them. 
They are not reasonable doctrines or philosophical deduc- 
tions. They are modes of the statement of facts — believed 
in, because not to believe in them would be to be without 
a belief. And this is a condition of mind impossible to 
any great number of men in the Christian world. 

The clergy may dismiss their fears and refrain from 
defence against any attack upon these fundamentals of the 
Christian church. Never again will the world lose its 
faith in the story of Jesus, until it shall forget it through 
a higher perception of the truth. The story itself once 
rightly interpreted by the limited following of its hero, 
has for centuries been degraded by conceptions unworthy 
of the grand hopes which have been based thereon. The 
attacks of infidelity have not been made upon the doctrine 
of the Divinity of Christ, but upon the puerile concep- 
tions of that doctrine. The miracles of Jesus have not 
been assailed, but the definitions of miracles. It is because 



±0 ROBERT ELSMERE. 

the statements of the church are unscientific, that physical 
science and the old philosophies have a seeming vantage 
ground, and the defenders of the faith tremble at the 
blows which shake the time-honored formulas of councils 
and dignitaries. 

The story, we repeat it, stands, and it will stand in 
human belief because it is worthy of belief. Xo laws of 
evidence can take away its credibility. It has been a 
power from the time it was lisped until now. Wherever 
told and among whatever people, it reaches the heart and 
plants itself. Nothing can uproot it. It displaces all 
other narratives of a kind men call the supernatural. The 
savage and heathen tribes, and devotees of all other relief— 
ions gladlv listen to its simple incidents, and accept it as a 
whole. It is all the missionary need carry to any people 
in any clime. 

It is follv for the learned to declare that it is not 
original or special in its outlines. The assertion that many 
religions older than Christianity relate an immaculate con- 
ception of their founder, and that the resurrections of 
exceptionally saintlike men have been believed among many 
nations is without weight, even if it could be proved true. 
Could it be substantiated that each particular incident in 
the Messianic account is duplicated separately in the 
legends of different mythologies, it would not weigh in the 
least to take away the world's faith in the history of the 
Nazarene. The universal mind will cling more closely to 
the beloved narrative, as a mother to her babe, if ruthless 
hands attempt to tear it away from its embraces. 

Physical science and its seeming product, agnosticism, 
is a temporary mental habit, a mere superficial condition 
of some minds. Faith is not lost, even in those who 
declare they do not believe. To no one is the history of 



ROBERT ELSMERE. 11 

Jesus repugnant in its professed facts. Underneath, below 

the depths to which consciousness drops its plummet, rev- 
erence for every incident in the life of the Gallilean betrays 
the fact that the Christian world can not again lose faith. 
We should not mistake the distaste of many for the ex- 
pressions in which the trust of the multitude displays itself, 
or their impatience at the preaching of doctrines which so 
feebly or falsely portray the Christ, for disbelief in Jesus 
and his works. Religionists have insisted with so much 
acrimony that their conceptions of Jesus, and their expla- 
nations of his work must be the truth of the history, that 
many have grown tired, and through disgust have wanton- 
ly attacked that which was thus misrepresented. But it is 
to be seen that m their better moods infidel and critic have 
bowed reverentially to the real Jesus, whose evil por- 
traiture they have assailed. You can not fear, you can not 
even be offended, at any attempts to overthrow the doc- 
trine of the Divinity of Christ, or of miracles, when you 
have perceived by the occult touch of sympathy that there 
is not a human heart among the living that holds a tinge 
of malice to the personal Jesus, or entertains a desire that 
the storv of His wonderful power over evil should be other- 
wise than true. The seeming malice you recognize at 
once as an exhibition of a false self; a morbid condition of 
thought arid feeling, which has been engendered by a too 
protracted inspection of a faithless and tyranical ecclesias- 
ticism. 

Squire Wendover and Robert Elsmere, as portrayed, 
are impossible characters. The former can only appear 
when senseless reverence for a scholastic formula is in- 
sisted upon to the loss of a perception of the truth which it 
professes to set forth. When a religious doctrine has lost 
its life and fails to embody the advanced perception of the re- 



12 ROBERT ELSMERE, 

ligious mind, he who would destroy it should not be regarded 
with horror, even if he seems to assail that which it fails to 
manifest, viz., the truth. These iconoclasts have their 
place, and in the proper time their work will be found to 
be in the behalf of truth, though judged by those whose 
interest it is to hold fast to dead forms of words, as foes to 
all that is good and sacred. In the evolution of Christian 
thought it will surprise thousands to find that the Inger- 
solls have been favorable factors in the production of a 
higher perception of Divine truth, which was hindered or 
prevented by the labors of the zealous sticklers for time- 
honored dogmas. 

There never was an Elsmere in real life. An ardent 
and an imaginative temperament, combined with a rational 
and philosophical mind is rarely found. Such, when found 
in the ranks of the clergy, seldom leave their pulpits. Like 
Robertson, they rise above the dead level of the doctrines 
of their church, and put their living thoughts in new and 
more fitting forms of language. The skepticism that is 
engendered by historical and critical study in the gospel 
narrative, drives the man from the field of gospel work 
entirely. He, whose convictions can be overthrown by 
argument or laws of evidence respecting the supernatural 
Jesus, can not cling to the natural Jesus. That phase of 
religion now presenting itself and known as the humani- 
tarian, does not have for its propagators those who hold to 
an ideal drawn from the study of the Nazarenc, out of 
whose history the superhuman virtue and supernatural 
power have been abstracted. The highest truth, the 
noblest virtue, the most conscientious sense of right and 
justice and mercy which lie hid, or are supposed to lie hid 
in every breast, are the spirit and the basis of natural 
religion. The common people care naught for Jesus, if He 



ROBERT ELSMERE. 13 

did not heal the sick or rise Himself from the dead. The 
masses of the work people are compelled to a life of 
poverty, self denial, and mutual helpfulness, for which 
they need no ideal, since one is to be found in every tene- 
ment. The faith and courage and resignation of the Jesus 
who suffered at the hands of his fellows, can be duplicated 
in every London slum. The ideal which can draw the 
poor and charm the afflicted, and give hope to the mortal 
is the Jesus who can heal the sick, cast out devils, and 
raise the dead. He who would attempt to preach any 
other Jesus is not far removed from a simpleton. 

We have intimated that the doctrines of the Divinity 
of Jesus and of miracles have been assailed only in the 
modes of conception of these doctrines as preached and 
taught by the heads of the orthodox churches. It is easily 
seen that the ordinary Christian holds tenaciously to the 
word Divinity, because to him it expresses a reason for his 
profound reverence for the man Jesus as inconceivably 
good and possessed of mystic power. With his humble 
conception of self as a sinner and a mortal, he must worship 
one who could approach the invisible and eternal with the 
calm confidence which Jesus manifests. It is in accord 
with this reverence for the pure and spotless character of 
Christ that there should be a faith that such a one could 
not have been of common origin with sinners; that He 
should be endowed with supernatural gifts, and that the 
dominion of the shadowy worlds should be His by right. 
A personal Jesus must stand in the thought of those 
brought up in church or sect as the manifestation of Deity. 
Hence the divinity of Christ and the doctrine of miracles 
are sacred words to the masses, and the more sacred be- 
cause they are expressions which name two mysteries. He 
who speaks the words slightingly, or questions the pro- 



14 ROBERT ELSMERE. 

priety of their use, or contemptuously denies that they cover 
real historic facts, must expect, not to shake the faith of 
professing Christians, hut to be branded by the harshest 
epithets, and regarded as the foulest enemy of man and 
God. 

To the thinker, however, and the student, it has come 
to be seen that in theology the doctrine of the divinity of 
Christ is a mental puzzle. Definitions and conceptions are 
diverse. What it means has been a question which has 
made interminable controversy and unlimited discord. 
Reverent intelligence almost deplores the existence and 
use of the unscriptural word. The honest seeker after 
truth must lament its invention at the recollection of the 
unmeaning statements which have been forced upon the 
world, and the acrimonious spirit in which they have been 
assailed or defended. Happily for the common mind, none 
of these incomprehensible statements constitute its doctrine 
of Divinity. Jesus knows the mystery of my being; sees 
and pities my sinful nature ; can renovate my evil character, 
and is able to redeem me from death and give me immor- 
tality. This is the Divinity of Christ to the average 
Christian in all the generations past, and will continue to 
be his doctrine until a spiritual anderstanding leads him to 
a higher view. The conscious sinner in Christendom will 
stand unflinchingly here against all argument from history, 
from evidence,. and from philosophy. 

The argument against miracles will be found equally 
futile to shake the faith of the masses. Even the theolog- 
ical definition, which alone is assailed, will retain its hold 
on the average mind until that mind is led by a brighter 
light to perceive that miracles were the works, not of a 
divine man, but of the spiritual perception which Jesus 
calls Faith. 



ROBERT ELSMERE. 15 

The personal Jesus, as lie Himself declares was the 

door to truth. His Christhood lay far in advance of that 
divinity, which is but a name for the reverence with which 

the newly awakened consciousness of the sinner looks 
upon its powerful friend. In Divine Science, this term 
divinity represents the truth and reality of man, as he is 
and as he is known to the infinite intelligence, and miracles 
are not violations or suspension of natural law performed 
to attest the mission and authority of him who works 
them, but operations of that power, which belongs to every 
one who will rise to the perception that no physical law 
restrains the exercise of that dominion which is the prero- 
gative of the spiritual man. In Christian Science the 
divinity of Christ and the doctrine of miracles are thus 
blind statements of the mortal sense, unclosing its eyes to 
the first rays of the Gospel Truth. Jesus will in his per- 
sonality be called divine, as long as He is beheld to be the 
Christ in flesh. And His works will be called miracles, 
while the mind of Christendom continues to look at them 
as the exclusive works of the Son of Mary. But as 
thought steps beyond the threshold of the fleshly man, and 
begins to perceive the spiritual reflection of the infinite 
love and life thinly veiled in the personality of Jesus, 
divinity, as applied to that personality, will lose its mean- 
ing. We come slowly to perceive that Jesus was not 
teaching His exclusive divinity but the divinity of man, of 
all men. And in his invitation to follow Him, we discover 
that he means that we may know r that w 7 hat was true for 
him is likewise true for us ; that His sonship to the all good 
is our sonship, if we will but perceive and accept it. The 
world to which the carnal Jesus w^as the first dawn of 
light will come to the brightness of His rising, and when it 
does rise to the apprehension that His father is the universal 



16 ROBERT ELSMERE. 

father, it will no longer need to speak of the divinity of an 
elder brother. In its highest conception of truth, humanity 
will lift itself to the side of divinity, and it will be known 
that Jesus was man, the image and likeness of the Infinite. 

So too of miracles. While in human mind they are 
believed to be the exclusive works of Jesus, and impossi- 
bilities to othei men, and wrought by a power that is in- 
comprehensible and unattainable, thought is degraded. 
This false exaltation of Jesus is foreign to His wish and 
holds human faith in darkness and doubt that is a 
hindrance to its understanding of the truth. " Greater 
works than these shall ye do because I go to the Father." 
How easily His disciples caught the perception that all 
evil could be overcome by a law that was supernatural 
only to ignorance and blindness. When many who may 
have come to the spiritual insight of the reality of being, 
shall work the w r orks of Jesus, miracles will cease to be 
miracles or wonders. By their very frequency and 
through the multitudes of those who perform them, they 
will be accounted supernatural no longer. Then the law 
and the spiritual force which works in accordance thereto 
will be made manifest; and the healing of the sick and the 
restoration to soundness of the infirm will be known to be 
in accordance with nature, and not in violation of natural 
law. 

Christ is not dragged down by the exaltation of man 
through Christian Science to his level. The work of 
Jesus was to draw all men to Him. He is lifted up, and if 
to-day the conception of his altitude is named in the human 
thought Divinity, what use will that word subserve, when 
all men shall stand by His side, beholding with equal clear- 
ness of spiritual perception the allness of the Father, and 
the unity of the Son with Him? And what meaning will 



ROBERT ELSMERE. 11 

the word miracle retain, when all men through the Christ 
shall have attained unto health, righteousness and immor- 
tality? 

The Christian Church is responsible, if responsibility 
is sought, for holding back the faith of its adherents and 
checking the ascension of thought, which seeks to rise by 
the powerful attraction of its Christ, out of the error and 
darkness of a false nature. 

Not the Wendovers, but the pulpit teachers, have taken 
away the people's Jesus by hedging Him around with an 
exclusive divinity, which, by declaring he is the Son of 
God, shuts out all others from that sonship. And the 
bonds of sin, and sickness, and mortality are bound more 
tightly by the doctrine, that the miracles are subversions of 
natural law, to be wrought only by this one divine man, 
whom other men must reverence abjectly, but never dare 
to emulate. 

Christian Science would open the gates which 
theology has closed and barred; would lead men within 
the shrine; into the holy of holies, where they may behold 
their Christ; and as they begin to know and comprehend 
him, they will be transformed into His likeness from glory 
to glory. By the very understanding of Christ, men 
become Christlike, and through the perception of his 
power they learn to work the works of Him that is sent. 



OMNIPOTENCE OF FAITH. 



Jesus saith unto hi?n : If thou canst believe, all 
things are possible to him that believeth. — Afark ix., 2jd. 

He to whom all things are possible is omnipotent. 
Omnipotence is God. He that believeth, therefore, is 
divine. Belief, in the thought of the master is the secret 
of unlimited power. Jesus claimed that all power in 
heaven and earth belonged to Him. The faith of the great 
teacher of men was the manifestation of the Heavenly 
Father. Seemingly some men can believe in this exalted 
sense and some can not believe. To him who can believe, 
nothing is impossible. To him who can not believe, noth- 
ing is possible. The verb believe and the noun faith, are 
characteristic of the New Testament. Each occurs over 
two hundred times. They are so used as to imply a 
supreme importance. " Without faith it is impossible to 
please God." At first sight it seems almost safe to say 
that faith is a possibility to the mortal, personal man, and 
that it is the only possibility left to him whereby he can 
surmount the evil and reach the good. 

Human science despises all beliefs. The physicist 
declares he has no use for the word. Either we know or 
we do not know. If we know, we do not need to believe, 
for knowledge is higher and better than belief. If we do 
not know, it is folly to believe, for may we not believe 



OMNIPOTENCE OF FAITH, .19 

that which is false? Thus runs his argument. 

The metaphysician passes lightly by the central idea 
of the inspired writers, because of his inability to define or 
describe what is meant by belief. He can not classify it in 
his mental system. Faith is not an intellectual faculty. 
It does not belong to the passions or affections. It is not 
an element or product of the will. If a man believes, with 
what does he believe? Assuredly not with what our 
philosophers call the mind, as understood and defined in 
their systems. 

It must be admitted, how T ever, on all sides, that a man 
may and does do something that we have agreed to call 
believe. And so far from agreeing with the physicist, 
that man would be the gainer in ceasing to believe, we are 
very sure that he would be the loser of the most important 
of capacities if he should become unable to exercise that of 
faith. In human science faith is of no account — nothing". 
In divine science faith is of intense importance — every- 
thing. And it may be observed that human and divine 
science have this marked distinction, that the former dis- 
cards faith, and the latter is built up entirely upon it. 

The teachings of Christ do not appeal to the mortal 
mind. The Master does not expect that His hearers will 
understand Him by the exercise of such faculties as are 
brought into use in the mastery of human science. 
What the mental philosophers call perception, reason, 
judgment, imagination, reflection, or intellectual faculties 
do not avail much in laying hold of the elements of the 
gospel. Jesus appeals to some capacity of understanding, 
which other teachers overlook, and which He calls faith. 
Hence men believe, not with a mental faculty, nor with 
some capacity connected with the moral nature, but with 
something apart from these, which we may call the 



20 OMNIPOTENCE OF FAITH. 

spiritual element. For want of a better designation Paul 
calls it the heart. " With the heart man believeth unto 
righteousness." 

If the thought remains with us, that there is some ele- 
ment of goodness in the personal man, some seed of right- 
eousness which may develop and grow into character 
acceptable to God, something that renders him capable of 
redemption and makes him a co-operator with Christ in 
his own salvation, assuredly it is named faith in the New 
Testament, and its seat is in something which is called the 
heart. Now by heart we do not understand the carnal 
mind, nor the carnal affections, nor yet the carnal will. 
The word is used by Jesus and His disciples to designate 
that which receives the word of God with acceptance or 
rejects it in unbelief. The divine intelligence recognizes 
that which believes His word, for it is the true man — the 
child of God. 

Faith is a spiritual exercise, and not mental. Belief 
does not make us children of God, for it is the child of 
God that believes. It is an accommodation to sense to say 
that man becomes spiritual by believing. Faith reveals the 
Son of God, it does not create Him. The heart of man is 
an expression evidently designed to convey the idea of the 
substance or entity of man. The good heart is the spiritual 
entity of man. The evil heart is the false claim of entity 
set up by the carnal or fleshly man. The good heart or 
true spiritual man believes. The evil heart or the false 
carnal man does not believe. " That which believes shall 
be saved ; that which believes not shall be damned." 

In the language of the disciples belief is identical 
with r'ghteousness and unbelief with sin. It would seem 
that Jesus held men responsible for this phase of character 
only. To Him faith w^as all the goodness that could be 



OMNIPOTENCE <>i FAITH. 21 

manifest, and unbelief all the evil that deserved punish- 
ment. We are now ready to perceive that the words 
believe and faith have a false or mortal significance and a 
true or infinite significance. In Christian Science we are 
compelled to use the words that are signs of mortal 
thought as expressions of the spiritual truth. Intelligence, 
in the material mind, is a word that stands for the sum of 
mortal conceptions in the personal man. In Christian 
Science it stands for .the omniscience that is God. So to 
believe in the material world is to assent to the facts of 
sense and consciousness, and faith is the condition of mor- 
tal man in which action is supposed to have its basis. 
In the spiritual realm, and in the lips of Jesus, to believe is 
to assent to the spiritual facts of an unseen world, and 
faith the condition in which action in that realm is not only 
possible but necessary. Spiritual perception and faith are 
not to be separated and considered as two distinct opera- 
tions as in mortal thought. With physical eyes men say 
they see, and having seen they believe. The condition of 
belief, is a consequence of the act of seeing. Not so in 
the spiritual realm, " for blessed are they," says Jesus, 
u who have not seen and yet have believed." To believe 
in spiritual truth is one with the perception of that truth. 
It is more, it reveals that truth. Faith lays hold of the 
truth which underlies the revealed word and makes it 
manifest. 

What men call belief in this life has two prominent 
laws. One is, that when evidence sufficient and- of indispu- 
table character is presented, belief follows. If men are sure 
that their eyes or ears are in a normal state they believe in 
their perceptions. If they have confidence in the veracity 
of a witness they also believe in his testimony, if it be so 
confirmed as to preclude the possibility of mistakes. The 



22 OMNIPOTENCE OF FAITH. 

other law is that of childhood. Children believe whatever 
is told them by those whom they revere. The condition 
of belief is therefore the normal and natural condition of 
infancy. Unbelief in testimony or the declaration of 
another, is not natural and does not begin until veneration 
or love is lost. Love and trust go hand in hand. Hatred 
and distrust can not be separated. 

Jesus would have all men stay in the condition of 
childhood, where love is spontaneous and faith is its twin 
brother. If they had strayed away he exhorted them to 
come back and be again a? little children, where faith 
would be a possibility, because love would impel them 
toward those who were kind and considerate of their wel- 
fare. 

" The faith that works by love" is the faith of saving 
and redeeming possibilities. Humanly speaking, it is the 
only faith which is accompanied by power. The belief 
that is the result of argument, or the conviction wrought 
by signs and evidence is worthless, because it is mental 
and not spiritual. Evidences of Christianity may be drawn 
from material nature; from the laws of human life, from 
parallels, analogies, contrasts, harmonies, corroborative 
testimonies, and what not, until society at large entertains 
a conviction and calls it a belief, that Christianity is the 
true religion, and yet this universal faith is comparatively 
valueless and wholly destitute of possibilities. But when 
the love that is God, manifest in the Christ, draws the 
child man unto itself, the confidence with which he accepts 
the declaration of this love and truth becomes the source 
of unlimited power. We need not discuss the question of 
why some can believe and others can not, nor need we say 
in this connection that all can believe who w^ill believe. 
As we have already seen, faith has no connection with 



OMNIPOTENCE OF FAITH. 23 

volitions. They can believe who can love the teacher of 
spiritual truth. Those who despise, scorn, or hate the 
teacher can not believe, because they can not love. 

New Testament faith has thus been shown, not to be 
a mental act or condition, but a spiritual one. It is the 
exercise of the true, not of the false man. It has no sphere 
of action within what the physicist is pleased to call natural 
law. It moves amid unseen surroundings, and has no 
respect for the convictions that are dependent upon sense 
and visible proofs. 

" All things are possible to him that believeth." The 
possible things of faith have their true exhibition in the 
spiritual world, but the power of him that believes must to 
the human understanding have a manifestation in the mate- 
rial world. And the object lessons of the Great Teacher, 
which serve to illustrate His statements, are abundant and 
plain in the great departments which the human mind 
assigns to this world. We would comprehend the sweep 
of the statement of the text better, perhaps, if we enlarged 
it by saying that the things which, in the world's knowl- 
edge, are known to be impossible are possible to him who 
believes in their possibility. This would be a belief against 
knowledge. But, as we have seen elsewhere, the so-called 
knowledge of this world is, when differentiated down, per- 
ceived to result in that condition of thought which is 
worthy only of the name of belief. 

When Jesus says to His disciples: " If ye have faith as 
a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, 
remove hence to yonder place, and it shall remove," we 
have a statement of the power of faith over inert matter. 
Our first consideration is the possibility of belief. Who 
could have faith enough even in sincerity to make the ex- 
periment? Could a man be found, who would in the pres- 



24 OMNIPOTENCE OF FAITH. 

ence of others command a mountain to remove, and not 
feel in so doing that he was playing the fool ? 

Had there been among the disciples of Jesus on that 
occasion, a modern civil engineer, what would have been 
his thought when he had taken in the full meaning of the 
great teacher's words? His trained e} e would have 
measured at a glance the height, diameter, and circumfer- 
ence of that mountain. He would rapidly have approxi- 
mated by mental calculation the number of cubic yards 
which were to be removed. The force by leverage 
required, or the number of loads to be drawn by steam or 
horse-power to remove it would have passed rapidly 
through his mind, and he would have turned away in dis- 
gust as from the babble of a fool. It is safe to say that he 
could not have believed, that by his word of command, the 
mountain would have risen up and seated itself in the spot 
which he might direct. The engineer thinks himself in 
possession of a science. He knows that earthy materials 
are ponderous; that immense forces are necessary to their 
removal; that solid rock is tied fast to foundations under- 
neath, and that cohesion and gravity act under laws which 
are unalterable, and to displace Horeb or Hor by a word 
of command is the thought of a dreamer or fanatic. 

But all this thought of science or knowledge is empty. 
The engineer's knowledge is belief only, and his attitude 
to the great teacher is well defined. It is belief in the 
material pitted against faith in the spiritual. And the man 
of science can only believe in the proposition of Jesus when 
he has discovered that his science is not knowledge but 
belief, and that this belief covers not the truth but the 
falsity of things. When he has learned to unbelieve, that 
rock is ponderous and that cohesion is force, and that mat- 
ter is substance and man is weak and must effect his pur- 



OMNIPOTENCE OF FAITH. 25 

poses through skillful management of one material force 
against another, he is in a condition to listen to the spiritual 
teacher who knows that the weakling is without science or 
knowledge. 

If it be true that there is spiritual power, and that man 
is master of the world and can change it by his simple 
command when he believes he can, what an advantage a 
child has over the learned man, who has lost this power of 
faith in the unseen truth by belief in the visible falsity. 
The latter must unlearn all that he calls science, and deny 
to himself every property and law which he had accepted 
as essential to material substance. 

There is no excuse for a misinterpretation of the state- 
ments of Jesus. Every proposition of His announced to His 
disciples was ocularly demonstrated. He proved that 
inanimate nature was obedient to His word, and when He 
himself unfolds the reason why other men did not assume 
the same mastery of the material elements, His words are 
worthy of consideration. That the mountains could be 
brought low, valleys raised, deserts be made fertile, rocky 
places smooth, and crooked paths straight by the command 
of any man who had no doubt in his heart when he uttered 
his command, is the plain teaching of this science which is 
called Christian, after its founder. He that denies " that 
all things are possible to him who believeth" has not yet 
seized the words of the great teacher. The true disciple 
will admit them to be the statement of truth, but append a 
doubt as to the ability of an ordinary man to believe that 
his word could remove a mountain. The Christian world 
is conscious of its lack of faith. It begins to lament its 
inability to believe in the power of the word. 

The proposition of the Master has its most evident 
unfolding in the organic world; also its most striking dem- 



26 OMNIPOTENCE OF FAITH. 

onstrations. He to whom the words of the text were ad- 
dressed was the father of a child doubly afflicted with 
dumbness and epilepsy. " If thou canst believe that my 
word will heal him he will be healed," is a proper para- 
phrase and application of Jesus' reply to a request for his 
son's deliverance. 

It is noteworthy that this poor man could believe 
that the word of Jesus possessed unlimited- power. We 
might safely affirm, however, that it would have been an 
impossible stretch of faith for him to believe that his own 
word would have been equally effective. 

In the complete circle of human evils, we justly con- 
conceive that Jesus would announce it as a theorem of 
spiritual science, that all disease and mental and bodily 
affliction would disappear at the command of any man 
who could believe that they would so disappear. We will 
admit no qualification. Any man, woman, or child, can 
banish disease by the simple command, who believes that 
the disease must and will obey him. This is Christian 
science. " All things are possible to him that believeth," 
is the highest statement of that science which can now be 
apprehended by the human mind. The Christian world 
s beginning to assent to this statement without mental 
reserve or such qualification as tends to render it nugatory. 
It is also waking to the fact of its inability to believe. 
It is a marvelous step upward on the part of the visible 
church, to accept practically the doctrine of the power of 
faith. It is equally encouraging to note, that it is also alive 
to the fact, that there are so few in its folds who have the 
courage of conviction. Prayers by the million are made 
in behalf of the afflicted in body and mind, but without 
avail. Rarely can a man be found among the sects, who 
would venture to " rebuke a fever" or expel a devil in 



OMNIPOTENCE OF FAITH, 27 

words, whose tone would indicate his belief that the disease 
or demon would obey him. 

Why men can not believe, is the question of the hour. 
It is easily answered. The great body of nominal Chris- 
tians believe in human science. Chemistry with its ele- 
ments, compounds, and combining forces; natural philo- 
sophy, unfolding qualities and properties of matter, and 
the laws which control it at rest or in motion ; engineer- 
ing, which devises machinery of every description to seize 
and apply physical forces in all departments of human 
activity; geology, which reveals the necessity of inter- 
minable periods for changes in the material world, and 
above all, the science of medicine, in which each disease is 
portrayed as having features and powers peculiar to itself 
which can not be overcome except through numberless 
appliances and consummate skill — all these have been 
received, and the male mind is toned by them into a condi- 
tion of belief which renders the very thought of man's 
supremacy over nature by his word only, as the acme of 
folly. Men believe in Edison more than Jesus, and the 
power of a great inventor is more confided in than that of 
Christ. Faith in the material man, must debar the human 
mind from a faith in the spiritual man. Until we give up 
our confidence in physical forces, it will be in vain that we 
essay to lay hold of the spiritual force that is omnipotent. 

And herein lies the secret of the superior faith of 
woman when compared with man. Few women have 
mastered physical science theoretically. They are not so 
generally the slaves of force and matter as their brothers. 
They neither see nor believe in the dominion of physical 
agents. To them, therefore, the statements of Jesus do not 
hear the impress of mystery, nor do they seem to be 
expressions of folly. Many can and do in their hearts 



28 OMNIPOTENCE OF FAITH. 

accept the words of the Great Teacher with absolute trust. 

We announce it as the phenomenal fact of the decade 
that there are hundreds of women, who are meeting the 
ills and troubles of life, and conquering them by mere 
declarations or commands given in the confidence that evil 
will shrink and disappear at their word. 

Their faith, too, is genuine. They do not make their 
declarations with doubt and blushes. They have no feel- 
ing of presumptuousness or folly in rebuking a fever, or 
expelling a demon. They have ventured upon a confi- 
dence drawn from the teacher's word, that man is the 
master of his world, and that the world must obey his 
word, when that word is spoken in the confidence of divine 
authority. 

The assurance w T ith which Jesus addressed the 
tumultuous sea or the demon of disease, and the unwaver- 
ing expectation that He would be obeyed, did not rest in 
the human mind of the Master. When Canute rebuked 
his flatterers, who would persuade him that the earthly 
king was lord of the world by virtue of his crown, he 
mockingly bade the tide stop at his feet and advance no 
no further. He was not obeyed, for he knew that the 
human mind which believes in its own subjection to 
material law was not able to assert a supremacy over its 
own master. But when we rise to the conception that it 
is the will of the Good that the word of faith should over- 
ride every claim of power in the physical forces, then have 
we courge to say the words that are pregnant with divine 
authority. It is then, not the word of humanity, the 
speech of human thought, but the declaration of the 
higher power. For in the highest sense, the word of 
faith is the word of God. 



THE GOOD IS ALL. 



But yet I would have you wise unto that which is 
good, and simple concerning evil. — Ro??i. xxi. 19. 

There is but one good, while evils are innumerable. 
Belief in evils is admitted; faith in the good is scarcely dis- 
cernible. It will be readily acknowledged that the rela- 
tion of good to evil is one of opposition, but not so readily 
admitted, however, that this opposition is total and 
destructive. If good and evil are antagonistic to the 
extent that one is positive and the other negative, like light 
and darkness, for instance, it is of manifest importance to 
distinguish which is the positive and which the negative. 
If good is substantive, and therefore positive, evil must be 
negative. If, on the other hand, evil is substantial and real, 
the good must be nothing — the absence of evil. The error 
of human belief would seem to center in this — its admission 
that good and evil have both the nature of realities, and 
that their opposition is only one of dissimilarity. They 
can exist together, but not harmoniously, and the problem 
of human thought is how to make the discord as tolerable 
as possible. 

Christian science is radical and will not for a moment 
allow that the evil and good may dwell together, even in 
discord. It asserts that the good is, and that the evil is 
not, except in the human belief. Lt holds to the positive- 



30 THE GOOD IS ALL. 

ness of good, and claims that the evil departs from its 
presence as darkness is dispelled by light, or as the cold 
vanishes before the incoming of heat. 

Good and evil are thoughts. Neither have existence 
when thought is not. If there was no mind, or belief of 
mind, there could be no reality either of good or evil. If 
evil prevails over good, it must find its supremacy in the 
thought. If good destroys the evil the battle field is 
primarily in mind. Whatever tokens of victory on either 
side may be externally manifest, it is self evident that the 
strus^ie itself was mental. 

111 science there is no struggle. The presence of the 
good to thought is sufficient. The evil retires before it. 
The mind that thinks good does not think evil at the same 
time. The knowledge of good displaces the knowledge 
of evil. As to the pure all things are pure, so to him that 
thinks only of good there is no evil. Evil can not enter 
where the good is, as darkness can not displace the light. 

If the good is positive and substantive, and the evil 
negative and unreal, then must the good be God. And 
the mind that claims to know evil or to hold evil in its 
thought as real, must of necessity deny the reality of good 
and be ignorant of God. Mortal man is, therefore, hope- 
lessly in error, and the good which he calls such is not 
good, but is an attenuated or modified thought of evil, and 
discord is not the result of evil in conflict with good, but 
is the inharmony which springs from the contact of dis- 
similar evil thoughts. 

There is a lesson that cannot be overvalued in the 
fact that even the word good has no plural form, while 
evil in human experience is seldom used in the singular. 
The detection of the multiplicity of evils and the unity of 
good is an awakening to truth. It is the initial perception 



THE GOOD [S ALL. 31 

of the divine existence. What the human mind calls 
knowledge it must gain by the process of analysis and a 

subsequent synthesis. The evil has elements. It can be 
taken apart and put together again. The good is indivisi- 
ble, and being without parts and a unit it is incapable of 
analysis. Hence the mortal man is forever seeking to 
know the good as he knows the evil, but without sue 
The good has always eluded him. Were God a being 
constituted of elements, such as righteousness, truthful- 
ness, justice, and holiness, the human mind might hope to 
separate these elements, and by their reunion detect the 
good that is God, but this is impossible and God in conse- 
quence remains undiscoverable. The negative character, 
or unreality of evil, is one of the foremost predicates of 
Divine Science. Its admission even in part would pave the 
way to the higher perception of the enduring truth. Evils 
are believed to be innumerable, and could we take them up 
singly and demolish their claims to reality in but a few 
instances, we are certain that the disappearance of each 
false claim would be" followed by a perception of the truth 
that is hidden by this claim. 

The word health represents a spiritual thought, and 
is unital, in the sense that it is not composite or made up of 
elements. It is not a material condition, and is not, there- 
fore, an object of consciousness. The carnal or human 
mind is unable to define it, because it is incapable of 
analysis. When the attempt is made to describe health it 
will usually be found that if the language emploved be 
composed of positive terms, it results in saying that health 
is health and nothing more. The want or absence of 
health is named sickness or disease, and men are wont al- 
ways to describe health by terms which imply the reality 
of sickness or pain, and assert that it is a condition in 



32 THE GOOD IS ALL. 

which the body is free from these evils. If men were 
never sick or diseased the word health would not have 
been invented. Health is good, but consciousness can not 
recognize the good. Disease, the negative of health, or 
its absence, and therefore nothing — no health — is an object 
of consciousness, and its only testimony to the carnal man 
is of the presence or absence of disease. Now it declares 
its presence and subsequently its departure, leaving behind 
nothing — no disease or health. Just here you may dis- 
cover the falsity of the human mind. Its only power is to 
perceive the evil, and believe in it as the reality, and by so 
doing conceive of the good as the absence of evil and 
therefore nothing in itself. It has passed into a proverb 
that " no man prizes health until he has lost it." This is 
equivalent to saying he is always conscious of disease or 
pain, but can not be conscious of health. On recovery 
from sickness all he can know is that disease and pain are 
no longer, and his joy is not over the conception of a pres- 
ent good, but the absence of a departed evil. 

There is but one health, but there are a thousand dis- 
eases. This one health simple, unital, and perfect, stands 
as the positive good over against each disease as an evil. 
If you take from human consciousness the thought and 
fact of fever there remains no fever, of pleurisy there re- 
mains no pleurisy, of diphtheria there remains no diphtheria, 
or health of which the carnal mind can not become 
conscious, inasmuch as it is the same entity in each and 
every case, and without elements or phases. Disease or 
physical evil is complex, and the human mind is not only 
conscious of it as a whole, but is capable of analyzing it 
and describing it in detail. Our medical teachers who 
make it their business to furnish the world with descrip- 
tions of these thousand and one bodily evils, do it on the 



THE GOOD is ALL. 33 

basis of the positive reality of disease, and volumes with- 
out number attest how thoroughly and conscientiously they 
have done a supposed duty to their fellows. But were 
they to set themselves to the task of describing for the 
benefit of human kind, that which to them is freedom 
from these evils, the result would be the single phrase — 
health is health. 

The infinite mind, which is spiritual and knows no 
evil, is conscious of health, for health is good, and it must 
be conscious of all good. And man, His child, can only 
become conscious of health in the mind which is spiritual 
and not carnal. This spiritual mind has no connection 
with or dependence upon the material body, and cannot, 
therefore, be affected by it. This is not, however, to say 
that it cannot seemingly affect the body. The carnal mind 
is evil, the spiritual mind is good ; the one positive, the 
other negative. As the spiritual mind is heeded the car- 
nal disappears, and the consciousness begins to testify of 
health where before it testified of sickness. The body is 
the creature of consciousness. And if consciousness will 
recognize the evil only to be real, it will bear no testimony 
to the good as positive, but when it is led by spirit to 
recognize the good as real, the evil, sickness will depart. 
The darkness departs with the light, and its departure 
reveals its nothingness. 

Jesus knew no physical harm or disease, because His 
consciousness was not physical but spiritual. And He is 
the light of the world in that He would have men to 
know what He knew — viz : That by discarding the 
reality of physical evil they could come into the apprehen- 
sion of the physical good, or health,. 

Virtue is good, and, like health, is a unit, and by the 
human mind is incapable of definition. Men will only 



34 THE GOOD IS ALL. 

describe it negatively. Its opposite is vice. But vice, like 
disease, is multifold. There are numerous vices, and each 
vice is opposed to the same indescribable virtue. If we 
try to subdivide virtue into virtues it will be found that 
each virtue is the same. We have different names for 
what in human thoughts will be found to have no differ- 
ence. Sobriety is no drunkenness, chastity no indulgence 
in lust — both nothings, only the absence of vices supposed 
to be positive entities. A stone man is both sober and 
chaste — that is, free from drunkenness and lechery. Here 
again the human mind will insist upon making the evil 
real, and the good only the absence of the evil. Our 
moral teachers like our medical doctors overwhelm us 
with descriptions of vice, and can only on the positive side 
instruct us, that virtue is virtue. We would again have no 
use for the word virtue if we had no consciousness of vice, 
and the highest conception that the carnal mind has of 
this spiritual good is negative — that is, that it is the 
absence of the evil. God knows virtue, but He could not 
be conscious of vice. Virtue is spiritual, and only the 
spiritual mind is conscious of virtue as a reality of being. 
The carnal mind is incapable of virtue except as the absence 
of vice. We discern virtue only when we reverse the 
testimony of consciousness and learn that virtue is the 
reality of being and vice is a negative, destitute of entity ; 
and, like the body, the creature of consciousness, which 
can recognize the evil but cannot know the good. Virtue 
will appear in thought when vice disappears from the 
mind. The way to virtue, like that to health, is to turn 
the back on evil — that is, repent and look towards the 
good, and this will appear as the other disappears. 

Righteousness is another word whose meaning can 
be expressed in negative but not in positive terms* Its 



THE GOOD IS ALL. 35 

opposite is sin. There is but one righteousness, whilg 

there are main' sins. It is easy now to perceive that what- 
ever entity it may possess must be spiritual. The human 
mind is not capable of positive righteousness. Sin, if 
defined to be transgression of the divine law, may be 
avoided in so far as to enable eonsciousness to say there is 
no transgression, but the obedience on the positive side is 
manifestly an impossibility. This the Scripture declares 
and ordinary perception confirms. It may not be so readi- 
lv admitted, however, that the human mind is incapable 
of apprehending righteousness. If it is a spiritual thought, 
as one of the things that are divine, it must be spiritually 
discerned. All attempts by the carnal mind to even define 
it have the usual result. It is nothing more than the ab- 
sence of sin. And this inability to perceive its positive 
character grows out of the inherent nature of the mind, 
which cannot but comprehend sin as a reality and right- 
eousness as its negative. Take away sin and there re- 
mains no sin or righteousness. This is the highest con- 
ception possible to the mind which so constantly affirms 
the reality of evil. 

The one righteousness stands opposed to each of the 
numerous sins. If it were possible to annihilate the sin of 
murder, the righteousness that remains would be in no sense 
different from that which would follow the destruction of 
theft. 

The infinite mind knows righteousness as a positive 
thought, and it must enter the divine consciousness and 
dwell there constantly to the exclusion of the thought of 
sin. The thought of sin implies the absence of the thought 
of righteousness, inasmuch as sin itself is but a name for the 
negative of righteousness, and it would be as manifestly ab- 
surd to hold that an eternal consciousness of right could appre- 



36 THE GOOD IS ALL. 

hend the wrong, as to assert that we could perceive the light 
and the darkness at the same moment of time. Jesus knew no 
sin, for only the sinful mind can apprehend sin. And if 
sin be negative and without reality of being, the mind that 
is conscious of it as a reality, can not be mind but must of 
necessity be the negative of that mind which is conscious 
of righteousness. Our religious teachers like the moral 
and medical are bent on maintaining the reality of sin. 
Their descriptions are of sin, their exhortations, against sin, 
and they fail to perceive that in mentally portraying the 
power of sin, they necessarily shut out the spiritual ability 
to discover righteousness. When men shall have learned to 
doubt the positive character of sin, they will begin to 
apprehend the reality of righteousness. They can only 
know righteousness by unknowing sin. Spiritual thoughts 
are always units, and because the carnal mind which is a 
complexity of mind in its own consciousness is unable to 
analyze a spiritual thought it always fails to perceive it. If 
a thought of evil in the carnal mind be destroyed, so much 
of that mind itself is destroyed, for the carnal mind is but 
the source of evil thoughts and conceptions. And if we 
conceive of the banishment of all the thoughts of evil, the 
carnal mind would in this process itself disappear. The 
destruction of the carnal mind is not the destruction how- 
ever of the man, but of a false belief of man, and that 
destruction of the carnal would be followed by the appear- 
ance of the spiritual mind. The total extinction of the 
idea of disease w r ould leave consciousness of health as 
reality. The obliteration of vice from thought is the 
necessary prelude to the presence of virtue, and righteous- 
ness will be the lot of man when sin is no longer conceiv- 
able. 

Spirit is substance, real and positive substance. It is 



THE GOOD IS ALL. ST 

unital and not complex. It exists, but it had no beginning 

and it can have no end, and because of its unity it is incapa- 
ble of change or dissolution. The infinite mind knows 
spirit and is conscious of its being. Its negative— no spirit 
can be nothing, but the opposite or negative of the infinite 
mind — no mind, or, as it is designated, the finite carnal mind 
asserts a knowledge of this negative of spirit and names it 
matter. Reversing the truth of things it declares that 
matter or no spirit is substance, and to crown the error 
conceives of matter as the only substance and declares as 
its highest conception of reality that spirit is an immaterial 
— that is an unsubstantial substance — the negative of mat- 
ter — nothing. To this false mind, which exchanges the 
negative for the positive, all is matter. Man is material ; 
the sim, moon, and stars are material, the universe is ma- 
terial. The thoughts of the infinite, spiritual mind are 
expressed only in material forms. The one God or Crea- 
tor, who is unital in Himself and is conscious of spirit as the 
sole substance, embodies His highest ideas in the com- 
plexity of the negative of substance known to a false mind 
as matter. The doubt which may and ought to develop 
respecting the testimony of carnal consciousness, should 
arise in the perception which is universal, that all that 
seems to be in matter is temporary, changeable and evil. 
If the fleshly man were perfect, good, healthy and immor- 
tal, the testimony of carnal consciousness would be with- 
out a flaw and undeniable. But as it is, there is room for 
a doubt, and the testimony of Christ or the spiritual man, 
against the witness of the carnal man, may be made to 
weigh. It is possible to believe in the unreality of sin, 
sickness and death. The negative character of evil and 
the unsubstantiality of matter have been received through 
the demonstrations of Jesus into human thought under the 



38 THE GOOD IS ALL. 

name of faith in Christ. Men have conceived of them- 
selves as spiritual — the sons of spirit or God, and in the 
power of this conception have demonstrated the unreality 
of evil. 

The false or carnal mind is destined to disappear. 
Personal or fleshy man will give place to the spiritual 
man, and the process by which this change is to be effected 
is now obvious. Faith in the good as substantive and real, 
belief in the evil as illusory and unreal, is the sure and 
divinely-appointed way of Salvation. 



ORIGIN OF EVIL. 



For God dotli know that in the day ye eat thereof, 
then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, 
knowing good and evil. — Gen. Hi., j. 

It is believed that Moses is the author of the Book of 
Genesis. Though a Jew by birth, through a strange 
chain of circumstances he had been adopted by the 
daughter of the King of Egypt, and had been educated 
with the view of his eventually coming to the throne of 
the most powerful empire of his time. He was master of 
the learning and wisdom which lay at the base of the first 
civilization of the world. The estimate of later ages has 
placed him, in intelligence and mental penetration, far 
ahead of the teachers from whom he is supposed to have 
received the rudiments of an education in political and 
philosophic learning. It is a fact of history that he became 
dissatisfied with what he had been taught, and that in 
riper years he rejected all human systems of government, 
discarded all the theories of philosophy, and threw aside 
all the speculations respecting the origin, character, and 
destiny of the human race, which the Egyptian mythology 
presented. He has given to the world what might be 
called, if not a history, at least a theory of its origin, diverse 
from all others. And it is a wonder, difficult of explana- 
tion, that the Mosaic cosmogony has been received not only 



40 ORIGIN OF EVIL. 

by the people which he organized into a nation, but bv all 
the nations which to-day call them themselves Christian, 
and by others also whose governments and religions differ 
essentially from the Christian. This cosmogony is, it is 
true, variously interpreted, but all who accept it, do so on 
the basis that its author was mentally illuminated, and 
that he had perceptions of the truth of being which were 
not shared by other men of his time. 

The most striking thought of the Mosaic account of 
the earliest history of man is that he is not now what he 
was originally. In constitution, essence, powers, and 
character, man is not only different from the orig- 
inal, but in many respects is the opposite or contrary 
of that original man. His surroundings are likewise 
diverse, if not the reverse of those which were primal. 
The heavens and earth which then were, were not the 
heavens and earth which now are seen to be. The former 
were good and approved by the infinite intelligence as his 
own work. The latter are evil and pronounced accursed 
of God. There are evidences that Moses foresaw in the 
future a restoration of the human race to their lost condi- 
tion and environment. And the government which he in- 
stituted among his people, the religious rites which 
he established, the ceremonies which he initiated, 
and even the substance and outline of his famous 
tabernacle, were all designed to lead upward and on- 
ward the human thought into a perception of the future 
perfect and immortal condition with Edenic surroundings. 
Thus does Jesus and His disciples interpret them, and the 
former does not hesitate to accredit Moses with this deep 
insight and foreknowledge of the outcome of all things. 

In accounting for the unhappy conditions of the 
human race, which mortal mind alleges to be now the sub- 



ORIGIN OK EVIL. 41 

ject of experience, Moses has given the world a narrative 
which has never been satisfactorily explained. 

If we can conceive that Moses believed that carnal 
man is not a reality of being, and that his earth is not 
really substance, and that what the eyes see and conscious- 
ness professes to reveal, are but dreams of existence with- 
out entity, and that all human history has no more basis 
than a vision of the night ; that time is not, and material 
events do not occur except in a disordered human percep- 
tion, we may have a hint of the difficulty which our 
author must have encountered in attempting to set forth 
such a belief. Many of the sacred winters do venture upon 
expressions which ought to be interperted in the light of a 
similar perception or belief. But few of their readers in the 
past have, however, accredited them with such mystical 
notions. In Moses' day none w r ere ready for such a revel- 
ation of the truth, if truth it be, and it would have been 
folly to have declared what centuries after Paul and John 
confidently affirmed that there are invisible things — an in- 
visible man, and an invisible environment of that invisible 
man, in comparison with which the visible things are tem- 
poral and as nothing. 

In our time, when the dream of mixed good and evil 
is approaching its close, thousands can perceive the unreal- 
ity of the material man and the material world, and are 
able to perceive, by faith, things more enduring and stable. 
The lost man, his lost Heaven and earth are coming back 
to his reopened vision and evil is melting away before the 
incoming light of good and truth. 

To Moses it was a problem how to express the fact 
of illusion in such a way as to make his words partially 
acceptable to the false belief of reality in evil. That it 
has been accomplished, history of the dream clearly shows, 



42 ORIGIN OF EVIL. 

and the narrative, with all its inconsistencies, is to-day the 
accepted truth of being in the belief of millions. 

Is illusion a possibility? Can it be that man is right- 
eous, pure and immortal ; that his world is perfect, good 
and eternal, and that a delusion, a delirium, a dream seem- 
ingly, has usurped his consciousness and played itself off as 
a reality of time and substance, and that sometime it will 
disappear and man awake to find it was all a dream, — , 
awake to know that he was never born in the flesh, never 
grew into sin, was never sick and never died? How 
could such a deception ever seem to be? And if the pos- 
sibility exists how could it become a fact? 

The illusion of man and his world as that illusion pre- 
sents them, must have a cause, for it is the nature of illu- 
sion to seem to be reality, and it therefore demands the 
cause of which as a reality it is the effect. But illusions 
have no cause for the reason that they are nothings, and it 
does not require a cause to produce nothing. But illusion 
hides reality, and the false mind of the illusion will demand 
a reason for its ability to hide the truth. 

Apart from dreams, whose phenomena are variously 
explained, there are no illusions, which the human mind 
will admit to be facts, except those produced by the eating 
of some herb, or fruit, or decoction of some tree or shrub. 

Moses was familiar with the wide-spread belief of the 
Egyptian mind in the fabled powers of the lotus. He 
was likewise familiar, doubtless, with the effects of Indian 
hemp or hasheesh, and in his relation of the mode by 
which, or the cause through which, man became in con- 
sciousness and sense other than himself, he has recourse to 
that alone w T hich could have conveyed a hint of the possi- 
bility of such an event. Even learned men, coeval with 
the Jewish Cosmogonist, accepted the fable of the lotus 



ORIGIN OF EVIL. 48 

caters, and believed that he who ate of its fruit or leaves, 
would lose all memory of the past and be compelled to 
begin anew his conscious life. 

They were acquainted with the effects of the hasheesh 
drug, and knew that it would produce a vision, which, for 
the time, would obscure the common realities of life and 
lift its victim into scenes of ecstasy and surround him with 
sights and sounds of unspeakable beauty, which would 
end in other seeming realities of darkness, horror and 
despair. 

Inwhat way could Moses, whose clear perception of 
truth revealed to him the unity of infinite intelligence and 
power, convey the thought of the illusory character of car- 
nal man and his material world other than the one he has 
used. 

To assert simply that man as he now knows himself 
and the world in which he so confidently believes, are un- 
realities — the illusion of a time, would be to speak words 
that for two thousand years would have been regarded as 
the expressions of folly. But to present the thought, that 
the good and beneficent Father of man, had created a tree, 
which, like the lotus, stood in the midst of the Garden, 
with latent power to produce a bewildering dream or a 
wild delusion in man if he should partake of it, does not 
shock the human mind, because in the midst of the dream 
are trees and shrubs of a like character from that from which 
Moses drew his explanation. The great minds of ancient and 
modern times accept it as a possibility and believe it as a 
fact. If poppies, and Indian hemp, and lotus trees are 
facts, says mortal mind, why may not the tree of knowl- 
edge of good and evil have stood to tempt the wayward 
fancy of the man and woman who were conscious of good 
and knew no evil? 



44 ORIGIN OF EVIL. 

The great Father warned his child against the results, 
and surely he can not be charged with injustice or wrong 
to his offspring. That state of supposed knowledge of 
good and evil in which Adam found himself when the 
intoxicating effects of his disobedience began to be felt, 
Moses would have his readers believe, were the results of 
this fruit upon his system. If the disobedient pair in their 
delirium found their world changed, and believed in the 
reality of their carnal bodies and a disordered condition of 
their minds and surroundings, they must infer that it had 
been produced by the curse of God. While such is human 
belief, law is a necessity and all the sacred provisions of a 
Divine government must seem to be required by those 
under the dominion of this belief. Is it not marvelous that 
the religious mind of past centuries has not caught a 
glimpse of the solution of the question of the origin of evil 
in this plain hint of Moses? It has always accepted his 
story as a matter of fact, because it has always made evil 
as real as good. But why it has not discerned that eating 
the fruit of a tree could not change the constitution or 
essence of being, is past comprehension. And why it does 
not perceive that Moses hints as plainly as he can as to the 
unreality of evil, is evidently because it is hugging the 
darkness rather than coming into the light. What we are 
endeavoring to present at the moment is that Moses with 
a wisdom that was far reaching, portrays man, human life, 
and the material world as it appears to sense as the result 
of eating of a tree whose properties were to take away 
perception of truth and induce a belief in a false and dis- 
ordered world, as the reality of being. No other mode 
was available. In his thought the cause of evil is anal- 
ogous to the cause of intoxication in the drunkard, delirium 
in a fever, dreams in sleep, visions from nitrous oxide, or 



ORIGIN OF EVIL. 45 

the ecstatic and subsequently appalling nightmares of the 
opium smoker. 

It is not nonsense to assert that illusion may seem to 
be reality, for that is the meaning- of the word. And he 
who has caught the illuminating thought of Jesus, not only 
suspects, but knows, that sinful and carnal man and his 
material world are not entities of divine creation. It is 
onlv in the full belief of the reality of things of sense that 
the question obtrudes itself, Who is the author of evil? 
The human mind has had lessons enough to lead it to sus- 
pect that things may not be what they seem, and this sus- 
picion is growing yearly into a positive disbelief in the 
realities of time and sense. 

The last thing that you will apprehend, says the 
author of Science and Health, is the unreality of matter. 
When you do catch the overwhelming perception that 
carnal man is " walking in a vain show," you will have no 
longer cause to ask how man came to fall from his high 
estate, or who was the author of his sin, his sickness, and 
his mortality. Evil as an entity w T ill disappear from vision, 
and the world of righteousness will rise to view when you 
have come to understand that the darkness of the human 
mind lies in the belief of unrealities to be the truth. 

The question which theology asks, and the dilemmas 
into which it precipitates itself supposedly by a belief in 
the Mosaic record, owe themselves to a complete misunder- 
standing of Moses' thought. The whole transformation 
scene in which the perfect, sinless and immortal man in 
Eden becomes carnal, material and mortal, is effected by 
eating of the fruit of a tree! Here an effect is portrayed, 
not only with a cause wholly inadequate, but of such 
a nature that no mode of explanation will reveal any 
relation conceivable as existing between the two facts. It 



46 ORIGIN OF EVIL. 

is subtlety and deceit that declares by the eating of the 
tree "your eyes shall be opened and ye shall be as Gods 
knowing good and evil." The only change here hinted 
at is in the mind of man. It is implied in the cunning of 
the serpent, that primal man was blind, — without percep- 
tion of a mixed condition of things, and that the result of 
disobedience in partaking of a forbidden fruit, would be 
his awakening to a knowledge of what otherwise would 
have been forever hidden from his view. Moses would 
teach, not that God punished man for disobedience, and 
changed him from his first estate of purity and righteous- 
ness, into another of carnality and shame, but that man, 
intoxicated by the delirious effects of the forbidden fruit, 
was no longer able to perceive the truth of his own being 
and his surroundings. Distorted vision, reversed percep- 
tion, false reasonings, and negative thoughts of an inverted 
and false mind, were the consequents of his disobedience, 
of which he had been forwarned. We are contending 
here for no literal interpretation of the words of Moses. 
We are trying merely to show that in suggesting the 
thought of the unreality of material man and a material 
world in which evil admittedly has dominion, the author 
of Genesis uses the only figure which he could command 
by way of illustration. As it is the nature of illusion to 
seem to be reality, the delusion of man must seek to ac- 
count for all the details of illusion as if they were realities. 
God was not changed by the false belief of illusion, 
though illusion so declared. Man was not transferred 
from the spiritual to the carnal ; the earth was not cursed ; 
Eden was not destroyed ; man was not banished from his 
home ; sin, and sickness, and death were not created and 
thrust in upon human experience, but illusion declared that 
they were elements of the new constitution, and the belief 



ORIGIN OF EVIL. 47 

of this illusion is all there is of reality to its creations. 
God is immutable ; Man is his offspring ; Heaven and 
earth are spiritual creations; Eden is perfect environment; 
eternity is the mode of existence, and these were, and are 
and always will be. They were never changed or lost. 
The carnal man, fleshly generation, sinful thoughts, base 
and sordid passions, a material world, events appearing 
and disappearing with times and seasons, these are not 
realities; they are the phantoms of a delirious dream, 
which seemingly float over and hide the eternal verities. 

You need not hope to reconcile the real universe with 
the false. The theology which assumes evil to be real, 
and would account for its existence in a world of divine 
creation must forever be at fault. 

The only God known in the dream is the spirit of the 
dream, and you will look for love and goodness and im- 
mortality in vain, while you hold that the sense and con- 
sciousness which tell of phantoms that they are realities , 
sjDeak the truth. The God of this world is unjust, cruel, 
and malicious. Why try to make out that he is other- 
wise ? Why not rather open your eyes to perceive that he 
is no God at all, and that his world is but a fitful delusion? 

That is not science which would deal with deceptions 
and reduce them to law and order. There are no laws in 
the world of flesh, save such as flesh makes for itself. 

That alone is science which deals with immutable 
and unchangeable verities, and the real man behind the 
dream is the only man who knows of God, as substance, 
spirit, life and truth. Christian Science would tell us of 
spiritual and immortal man, and unfold the spiritual law 
by which there is knowledge only of the good. No evil 
enters into Divine Science. It does not account for the 
fall of man. It has no theory of the origin of evil. It 



48 ORIGIN OF EVIL. 

replies to no whys. It simply denies everything on the 
side of evil — as without substance or essence. Man is not 
carnally generated — does not grow, decline and die. Man 
never sinned, was never sick, and is not mortal. The earth 
is not material, will not pass away. There are no epochs, 
centuries, or years. There is no human soul, either mortal 
or immortal. There is no carnal mind. All this is the 
false conception, the belief, if you will receive it, of a 
delirium, which was consequent upon the intoxicating 
effect of eating of the tree of knowledge, of good and evil. 
The delirium w^ill pass away in its own exhaustion, and 
Man will be found at last safe in the shelter of the ever- 
lasting arms of the Divine Love* 



DEATH ABOLISHED. 



Our Savior fcsus Christy who hath abolished death, 
a?id hath brought life and Immortality to light through 
the gospel: Whereunto I am appointed a preacher, and 
aiz apostle, and a teacher of the Gentiles : for the which 
cause I also suffer these things. — II. Jim., I., 10, II, 12. 

The civilized world of to-day is remarkable for its 
benevolent enterprises. These are generally known as 
causes — a special application of the word which doubtless 
is due to its similar use by the New Testament writers. 
St. Paul designates himself as the Apostle of a Cause. 
Prominent among humanitarian labors we may note the 
efforts of those who would spread liberty, intelligence, 
wealth and virtue. A few years ago the earnest endeavors 
of men to secure freedom for the slaves of America was 
denominated a cause — the cause of freedom, or abolition- 
ism. There is a cause of education, a temperance cause, 
and a cause of religion, and, following the example of St. 
Paul, it has come into a rule to apply the word to all 
organized effort of a philanthropic kind. 

All causes have a central idea, and this idea is set 
forth generally in two modes of statement, one of which 
we may name the positive and the other the negative. The 
root of this idea is the belief of good and evil. When the 
good is present in thought the positive side of the idea 



50 DEATH ABOLISHED. 

outlines itself. If the evil is before the mind the negative 
statement is the one chosen. In the anti-slavery cause, its 
apostles were accustomed to assert that freedom was a 
blessing and the inalienable right of all men, or, that 
slavery was a curse, entailing misery upon both the slave 
and the one who holds him in bondage. Those who advo- 
cate the cause of prohibition will assert the inestimable 
value of sobriety among men. They also declare the 
uncounted evils consequent upon a life of intemperance or 
drunkenness. The workers in the cause of education hold 
that intelligence is productive of grand and desirable re- 
sults. They may, on the other hand, declare that ignorance 
is the mother of poverty and want. The preachers of 
religion hold as a central thought the power of righteous- 
ness to bring happiness to a people. They also declare 
that sin is a curse to any man, society or nation. This 
mode of presenting or stating a cause seems to have been 
copied from St. Paul, who presents his cause in a similar 
manner. His central idea is that life and immortality are 
desirable and attainable, and that death is evil and can be 
abolished. 

Every cause, inasmuch as it seeks the removal or ex- 
tinction of the evil and the establishment of a supposed 
good, is named on the positive side. The causes of tem- 
perance and education, of freedom and religion, are so 
named from the evident reason that they will be consid- 
ered more worthy of attention when named in accordance 
with the results which they seek to secure rather than from 
the evils which they aim to destroy. The cause of the 
New Testament philanthropists deviates somewhat from 
this practice for a reason which will soon appear. St. Paul 
calls his cause the gospel or good news. In so doing, you 
will note that it is rather the name of a discovery than the 



DEATH ABOLISHED. 51 

appellation of something always known as desirable but 
long neglected. 

They who propagate a cause have imitated the author 
of our text in calling themselves preachers and apostles 
and teachers. He long anticipated them in the use of these 
terms. In the strongest sense he was a preacher, an apos- 
tle and a teacher. 

He likewise suffered in behalf of his cause. Strange, 
that men should suffer when they sacrifice themselves and 
give time and labor to secure that which is for the benefit 
of others. It is a fact, however, to-day as it w T as ages ago, 
that they who seek to promote the good are persecuted by 
those who, for selfish ends seek to maintain the evil. We 
may well believe that this common experience of the phi- 
lanthropist will perpetuate itself until the end, when evil 
shall no longer be a thought obtruding itself upon the 
attention of those who love their fellow men. 

Thus far you will reasonably infer that the cause 
which St. Paul preached and for which he suffered, though 
in many respects analagous to modern causes of benevo- 
lence, was identical with none of them. This inference is 
warranted by the history. The apostle and teacher of the 
gospel did not devote himself to the work of lessening an 
evil which had grow r n into frightful proportions through 
the carelessness and greed of men, and of developing a 
good by the combined effort of those who desired to see 
that good enjoyed by all. His central thought was too 
radical for the hope that it could be propagated by the 
ordinary means of philanthropic success. Death, it is true, 
is not only the last but the greatest of evils in human esti- 
mation, and life is prized as beyond all consideration. The 
central aim of all reformers, no matter how bright the 
prospect, when success shall he secured, pales before the 



52 DEATH ABOLISHED. 

daring attempt of the few chosen ones who, eighteen hun- 
dred years ago, advocated the possibility of delivering their 
fellows from the clutches of the last terror and bestowing 
upon them the blessed but unhoped-for boon of immor- 
tality. In any ordinary sense such an undertaking must 
be regarded as folly, and they who herald and advocate it 
deserve to be classed with alchemists and seekers for the 
philosopher's stone. 

It must be conceded, however, that the gospel of St. 
Paul and his colaborers contemplated nothing less. To 
deliver men from death and bestow upon them perpetuity 
of being is its professed object. This is something unlike 
Christianity, which seeks to promote the good in man and 
to eliminate the evil, but professes no ability to prolong his 
being above the allotted time. The mode of propagating 
the gospel was unlike the modes common to the Apostles 
of other causes. The evils of slavery, of intemperance, of 
ignorance, and of sin are not always apparent to the aver- 
age mind, and the preachers of temperance and intelli- 
gence, and righteousness, find it their most difficul work to 
arouse the attention and quicken the consciences of men to 
the importance and necessity of their work. Not so with 
the teachers of the gospel. The value of life and the fear 
of death are always present to the human mind, and there 
is not a sinner living who would not give all he possesses 
to prolong his life eternally. 

It would seem, therefore, that Paul with his gospel of 
salvation from death ought to have found a world of 
ready listeners, and a multitude willing to accept at once 
any conditions and perform any labors which would secure 
such a grand result as immortality. 

This would have been the result of his preaching had 
his cause not been unlike all others. His central idea is 



DEATH ABOLISHED. 53 

stated as a fact, and all that he required of his listeners was 
that they perceive this fact and believe it. Recall the 

wording of the text and give it earnest consideration. 
"Jesus Christ abolished death and brought life and immor- 
tality to light." Were you aware that such weighty 
words are part of your scriptures? Can you admit that 
they are words of truth, and stand as the expression of 
the fundamental doctrine of the Gospel? But the other 
day a man versed in Bible lore wondered at their quota- 
tion, saying that he had never noticed them in his New 
Testament before. Slavery, thanks to Garrison, Phillips, 
Beecher, Lincoln, and others has been abolished, and all 
men in America are free, but w 7 ere you aware that death 
likewise had been destroyed, and that now in a higher 
sense there is no death? Paul had no work to do like the 
reformers of modern times. An abler one than he had 
done the work before him. It was his to proclaim the 
fact and ask men to receive it as the truth. 

The world was not ready for such a preacher. It 
persecuted him from city to city, and his gospel was pro- 
nounced to be folly by the wise and was misunderstood by 
the ignorant. His words have come down to us, and the 
question is before you: Are they true, and if true, what 
can they mean? If you say they are true, then must you 
be ready to declare with us there is no death. But words 
without understanding are empty sounds, and he that 
would profit by the gospel must not only subscribe to its 
declarations in a general and formal way, but mast appre- 
hend their force and meaning. If death has been abolished 
and is no longer, then the word death represents nothing 
to be feared or shunned. Men cannot die. Why, there- 
fore, should they wail and lament over a fate which never 
can be encountered? 



54 DEATH ABOLISHED. 

The gospel of Paul addressed itself not to the senses 
or perception of men in the outer or material world, but to 
their faith. The great Apostle besought his hearers to 
take his statement of fact on simple trust. To accept and 
believe it could not harm them. To believe in the reality 
and dominion of death brought nothing but fear and dis- 
may, and would by no means disarm the king of his 
terrors. Why then believe or even think of it as some- 
thing? The apostle himself had laid aside all belief in the 
reality or power of death, and was confident that he would 
never die. His master and Teacher had assured his dis- 
ciples that as long as they continued in the faith of life, 
they would continue to live. The key note of the gospel 
is in the perception that death is no reality. This percep- 
tion is in the New Testament called faith. He who be- 
lieves that death is real, must die, while he who believes in 
the nonentity of death can not die. The being or entity 
of men is what they believe of themselves and no change 
can take place in that entity except it be a change of con- 
sciousness or belief. All men are mortal, that is they be- 
lieve themselves to be mortal and therefore seem to die. 
If all men believed themselves immortal none could die. 
" All things are possible to him that believeth." Jesus 
Christ abolished the dominion of death in human belief. 
Before his day, it might be said that it was impossible that 
man could believe in an escape from death. Those who 
crucified him had all confidence in death as the end of 
being, but when His disciples perceived that after His cruci- 
fixion he was still alive, they caught the truth, and learned 
that death was not death, but a false belief that life could 
end. Now, therefore, death is no longer to them who per- 
ceive after the manner of the Christ, that the power of 
death is in the admission or conviction of that power. 



■■ 



DEATH ABOLISHED. 55 

Let no one consider this as an argument. We are 
not reasoning, only attempting fully to state the truth of 
the Gospel. The belief of death is all there is of death; 
when the belief of death is dismissed death itself is gone. 
When immortality is perceived, it is present as a truth. 
That which can believe in immortality is immortal. The 
name of this possibility is man. Truth says man is im- 
mortal and the truth is Christ. Error says man is mortal, 
but it is not man that dies, but the error that pronounced 
man mortal. 

There could be no false belief called death, were 
there not another false belief called life. Death is the end 
of life. But if the life itself be naught, death is the end of 
nothing. That belief in life which calls itself man cannot 
define itself, trace its origin or give a reason for its exist- 
ence or disappearance. This is because it is without entity 
or substance. It is a vapor, a dream, an illusion. With- 
out a creator, there is none to uphold or preserve it. The 
life that is real is of God and cannot end because it is of 
Him. 

" That which is born of the flesh is flesh" but the 
flesh is not man. The flesh is without a creator. God is 
not its author and the fleshly man is neither a child of God 
nor His creature. The father of the flesh is flesh, and all 
attempts to trace its pedigree results in nothing but flesh. 
Christ the truth never would acknowledge that the flesh 
was born of the will of His Father. Nor is the fleshly 
mind — the mind that is in and of the flesh, the offspring 
of the infinite Intelligence. It calls itself life and is self 
created. If it dies, it dies because it is not life and has no 
existence, save in the false belief of itself as entity. To 
pass from death unto life is to cease to believe in the testi- 



56 DEATH ABOLISHED. 

mony of sense and carnal consciousness and to believe in 
the word of God or Truth. 

Jesus Christ abolished death, not as a fact, for facts 
cannot be abolished ; not as a reality, for realities are eter- 
nal, nor yet as a thought, for thoughts are known to the 
infinite intelligence who cannot perceive death as an idea; 
but as a belief. Jesus himself had no apprehension of death 
as something real even in thought. As often as He em- 
ploys the term, it is evident to Him it had no significance, 
nowever much it might be thought to mean to others. To 
Him as well as to His Father there were no dead, " for all 
live unto Him." Jesus would never acknowledge death, 
even in the presence of what men called by that name. By 
the side of the corpse and amid the crowd of wailing rela- 
tives He declared that the maid was not dead, but asleep. 
To His disciples, ignorant even of the phenomenon which 
had brought mourning to the sisters, who loved their 
brother well, he mildly communicated the fact that 
Lazarus was asleep, and afterward at the tomb He ad- 
dressed the corpse, who heard and responded to His call. 

We accept no equivocal interpretations, no accommo- 
dated meaning of the language of the great teacher or His 
apostle. Death was and is abolished by Jesus Christ, and 
we assert in the language of the author of Science and 
Health, who has risen as no other in this our day to the 
perception, that " there is no death." This is the Truth of 
the New Testament, which must be apprehended some- 
how or the Gospel remains a sealed book. For us none 
shall explain it away, by admitting that death may not be 
what it seems, but yet must be something- in itself, or by 
intimating that it may be a blessing in disguise admitting 
the soul to another and a better w T orld, or by a grant that 
the grosser part of man disappears through its agency. We 



DEATH ABOLISHED. 57 

maintain that death is nothing, absolutely nothing, but a 
belief of that which has no more entity than death itself. 

If death be nothing, then must that life be nothing of 
which death is the end. We admit it. The life that 
makes death a necessity is as much an unreality as death 
itself. Both are beliefs, not of man, but of themselves. 
Life believes itself to be life and death believes itself to 
be death. Two unrealities claim being and entity and de- 
clare themselves to be man, the offspring of God. This 
is the darkness into which Jesus came as the light — tl e 
error which must be dispelled by the dissolving power of 
Truth. 

" He brought life and immortality to light." The 
true life is God, and man is the expression of that life. 
This life is incapable of death and Christ is the demonstra- 
tion of its immortality. If God is the only life, what can 
that life be which, coming in, flits speedily away into non- 
entity, but illusion? If this false life did not obtrude the 
claim of being man, there could be no deception. The I 
in which it masquerades is of the " stuff of which dreams 
are made " — with no more reality of person than the spirit 
which is born aloft on roseate clouds in the visions of the 
Hasheesh eater. 

What a Gospel was that for which the Saints of the 
first church suffered, and yet counted their sufferings a 
joy! What a proclamation to make to the ills and woes 
of human belief, that life was not life, nor death, death, 
but that the real man is a child of God, crowned with 
everlasting joy and as immortal as His Father. The Gos- 
pel is not the good news of a new creation. It is not a 
work of redemption, but the revelation of a hidden truth. 
Its Apostle appealed only to faith. He asked that men 
awake, that they shake off the illusion of evil and open 



58 DEATH ABOLISHED. 

their eyes to the perception that nothing in the dream of 
sense was worthy of desire or fear. He clearly saw that 
man was never born of flesh, that he had no childhood, 
youth, adult age, decline or death, save in a false belief of 
being, and so was never mortal. 

No sin, no sickness, no pain; nothing present, noth- 
ing to come; neither life nor death could effect one 
who could see that his real being was untouched by 
these mere pretensions of power or dominion. The life 
of Paul was hidden with Christ in God. Hidden he ad- 
mits, but it was there all the same and he knew it. This 
knowledge he calls faith, and that faith was omnipotent. 
Before it all dangers by sea or land, all peril from foes, all 
tribulations and anguish melted away, and in its presence 
death was swallowed up in victory. 



THE TRUE AND THE FALSE I. 



" And He said unto them, ye are from beneath; I am 
from above: ye are of this world; 1 am not of this world" 
— John :•///., 2 j. 

REPORTED. 

An antagonism seemingly existed between Jesus and 
the Pharisees with whom He came so constantly in con- 
tact. At first sight it would seem as though that antagon- 
ism arose from their common position. Jesus assumed in 
His language and . in His actions to be a teacher, and 
claimed that He was authorized to teach, and implied 
always, if he did not say it definitely, that the Scribes, 
Pharisees, and doctors had no authority to teach, were 
without knowledge or intelligence sufficient to teach, and 
thus that they were not qualified to be teachers of men. 
If we stop a moment to inquire into the character of the 
teaching of Jesus and that of the rabbi, we can see that 
their instructions covered kindred if not identical subjects. 
Jesus could well have passed by the demagog that ad- 
dressed the people on politics, the school-master that simp- 
ly taught letters, the collegian that inducted his pupils into 
the higher classics, but when He came to confront those 
who gave lessons about God and the real being of man 
an antagonism arose at once. He, through personal expe- 



60 THE TRUE AND THE FALSE I. 

rience, if I may use that phrase, and intimate relation with 
the Father, declared that He was the only one who could 
tell men about that Father, and that there was no value in 
the teaching of the Pharisees, for they were really not 
acquainted with the being of God, and did not understand 
the being of man. So you can see readily enough there 
must have been opposition between this one teacher and 
the other numerous teachers who taught radically different 
theories. The claim of Jesus to be a teacher of men is 
founded, as you perceive, on something set forth in the 
text. You might at first declare that something to be 
character, or if that term does not seem to express it, you 
might say His origin was so diverse from others as that 
His claim to be an instructor of men might thus be vastly 
superior to that of His rivals. 

The thought before us in the text is the difference 
between the I of Jesus and the I of the human teachers, 
whom He opposed. " I am from above ye are from 
beneath. Ye are of this world I am not of this world-" 

Christian Science at first presented itself under the 
name of Metaphysics, and perhaps that name may still be 
applied if we put the proper meaning upon it. I ask you 
to assist me in trying to penetrate this afternoon the ques- 
tion that may arise for every one of us, What lies behind the 
little word I that we use so often, that we call the per- 
sonal pronoun, that, seems to represent us, and what is the 
I of Jesus which He declares to men around Him had 
another origin, character, or anything you may please to 
call it, that was so different from the I of those men who 
spoke personally against Him? The I the Pharisee claimed 
to be was from beneath. The I of Jesus was from 
above. The words above and beneath must reveal some 
significance to us or we shall fail to understand the teach- 



THE TRUE AND THE FALSE I. ()1 

ing of the Master. To the ancients, above meant the blue 
heavens over us, and their beneath was a bottomless abyss. 

Now yon apprehend at once that when Jesus uses 
these terms lie does it as an accommodation to human 
thought. There was in His time a belief of celestial and 
infernal regions, and Jesus implies that those who would 
teach what was not true were from the infernal regions 
and that lie was from the celestial regions. Now such a 
declaration as this in the ignorance of these people might 
easily be misinterpreted, and indeed they held Him to 
be a blasphemer because He thus claimed a celestial 
origin. The idea of celestial and infernal beings has alike 
happily passed away from the mind of man, and conse- 
quently we have no reason to dwell upon the language. 

All of us who have reached mature years are ac- 
customed to use the personal pronoun. Each in speaking 
of himself says I. But what do you mean when you say 
I? In attempting to answer such a question let us try to 
reach a solution by approximation. We connect with that 
personal pronoun I another — the possessive — my. We 
must reach the I through what is connected with the I or 
belongs to it. I stand before you ; you gaze at me and 
sav you see my body. I have a body and call it my body. 
But it is coirqDOsite — made up of many parts. I speak of 
my head, my hands, my feet, my lungs, my heart, my 
eyes, my ears, etc. Now first of all I think it is clear to 
you that my body is not the I, that my head, my hands, 
my heart, my lungs, etc., are not the I. We can go a 
little farther and assert they are not any part of the I. 
When the uses of the bodily parts are considered and I 
say that with my eyes I see and have sight, with my ears 
I hear, and with my hands I feel, I am sure that the sight 
is not the I, the hearing is not the I, and the touch is not 



62 THE TRUE AND THE FALSE I. 

the I, but because they are possessions or belongings they 
are not even a part of the I. Therefore the body or 
senses in no manner constitute what is represented by the 
personal pronoun I. No doubt you will say, most readily, 
we admit all this; man is higher up and above the senses. 
The I is mind, it is thought. I challenge you to sub- 
stantiate this to yourself, for you will still use the possessive 
pronoun and say my faculty of judgment, of reason, of 
comparison, etc., and because you use the pronoun my, 
denoting possession, you must infer that that which be- 
longs is not the thing to which it belongs. The reason, 
the judgment, and the faculty of comparison are none of 
them the I. The intellect is no more the self of being than 
the senses or the body. 

If we advance still further into the domain of feelings 
and speak of fear, love, hate, tastes, and appetites, we per- 
sist still in the use of the possessive pronoun and speak of 
my feelings, my tastes, etc., and recognize that they, that 
is, our feelings, are in no sense the I of being. We may 
advance another step and I may speak of my mind inde- 
pendent of my body. Whether it be the intellect, the 
sensibilities, or the will, you see that they are not the I. 
The will cannot be the ego because I speak of my voli- 
tions, and thus there must be something behind which rep- 
resents the pronoun I. The last step of all is into the 
domain of conscience, where we speak of our moral facul- 
ties and declare we are able to distinguish between risrht 
and wrong, and therefore know the good and evil, but we 
still use the pronoun and say our righteousness and our 
sinfulness, thereby demonstrating that the righteousness 
and the sinfulness do not constitute the being- we call our- 
selves. When we have passed through all the realms of 
human thought, be they mental, moral, or material, until 



THE TRUE AND THE FALSE r. 63 

we have grasped all there is of our belongings in every 
conceivable department, we still fail to apprehend what it 
is that we call the " I." We fail to find the possessor of 

all these possessions. 

But you will say there is a something that lies behind 
all these, and that is eonsciousness. Now if we should say 
that eonsciousness of being- is the being itself, I call to 
mind that we speak of our consciousness just as we have 
spoken of our memory and behind that consciousness still 
hides the undiscoverable, inconceivable something which 
we call the I. 

" I am from above," said Jesus, " ye are from be- 
neath." 

So far then we have not been able to discover any 
entity which the pronoun I represents in human beings. 

Now Christian Science comes to the rescue in this 
species of metaphysics, and solves the question by declaring 
that consciousness is not ours, and that the mind, body, 
and soul which we call the I is only a belief. There is a 
belief of being, and when you inquire what it is that does 
the believing you have to come back to the I. But remem- 
ber there is no I that is discoverable. 

Man has no senses by which he can discover this 
entity. There are no powers of the mind by which he 
can discover the I, and if you resolve it down and detect 
that consciousness is not the I and follow in the direction 
that " Science and Health" would lead you, you will per- 
ceive that it is a belief of existence, and that the I is not 
discoverable ; that the belief itself is without a believer, 
and all there is of existence that is supposed to be covered 
by the term I is simply a belief of it. Here Christian 
Science takes its position, its first fundamental position, 
and if we do not discover that the pronoun I, which we 



64 THE TRUE AND THE FALSE I. 

use every day and almost every hour of our lives, has no 
entity of being, we have not entered upon the study of 
Christian Science at all. 

We dwell, therefore, for a moment upon the simple 
declaration that the I of man is from beneath and that the 
I that is from beneath is from the fathomless, from that 
which has no depths, from the darkness of non-existence. 
The I of personal man is without being. 

When men think that the I is real, but distorted, 
the thought of God, but mis-shapen, they look at error 
erroneously, and this mistaken view of the personality of 
the false man must inevitably lead those who take, it out 
of Christian Science. 

The I of sense has no existence. The I of personal 
man is a nonentity. It is simply a belief and has no be- 
liever behind it. I would like those of you who are not 
familiar with our studies to follow in this line of thought 
and apprehend that you are unable to detect what it is that 
you call the I, to see that there is nothing to which the 
mental, moral, and material surroundings and possessions 
of this I belong. 

You look at a clock and say it is a clock. But take 
the hands, they are not the clock ; the dial is not the clock, 
the wheels are not the clock. All these together consti- 
tute the clock. But that is when the clock is contemplated 
as something external to mind. What I am to you or 
what you are to me is regarded as a whole. Your body, 
mind, soul, faculties, tastes, feelings, and appetites are the 
you to me. 

But when you come to speak of yourself and what 
the I of your being is, you are unable to discern it and 
can simply say I am conscious of being. 

The Cartesian theory of metaphysics begins by say- 



THE TRUE AND THE 1 VLSE I, 65 

ing: " I think, therefore I am, I aet, therefore I am. 1 
feel, and therefore I am." Here the expression of the I 

is drawn from the surroundings, but when you attempt to 
apprehend that which feels, thinks, and acts, you find 
yourself unable to conceive or declare what the entity of 
the I is. You have to assume that the I is a reality — a 
something. The Cartesian position is that the I has a real 
existence, and we know it by consciousness. 

I pause for a moment to look upon the environments 
of the I. This I must have a body, and there is no con- 
ception of its existence without a material body, or without 
mind and faculties. 

The very moment you begin to deny the entity of the I 
you will know at once you cannot trust to any reasoning about 
its connections, because if the I is non-existent, then what- 
ever belongs to it must be as non-existent as itself. If the 
I does not exist it has no body. If the I has no existence 
then it has no mind. That which is nothing cannot pos- 
sess something-. When the I disappears all the world of 
which it is conscious disappears. As we have remarked, 
this is the fundamental basis of Christian Science. " I am 
from above, ye are from beneath." The I from above is 
positive and real, spiritual, and pure, but the I from be- 
neath is illusion and unreal, the negative of that from 
above. Xow the I of sense that claims to think, act, and 
feel is nothing but a belief. There was a time when it 
did not even seem to be. There will be a time when it 
will not any longer be even a belief. 

I turn a moment to the other side. Jesus says: "I 
am from above." There is a peculiarity about Jesus that 
we do well to consider; that is a claim of two I's. It 
seems to have been necessary as a teacher of men to assume 
the false I as a belief. Otherwise there could have been 



66 THE TRUE AND THE FALSE I. 

no apprehension of Him, even by His own disciples. The 
I that is the Son of God had no relation to the I which 
man could discern. Now, when He says, " I am from 
above," mark you, He could not have meant the conscious- 
ness of His body, because that was born of Mary, as other 
bodies were born. He could not have meant His mind 
with the faculties of judgment, reason, comparison, etc., 
because that was seemingly the same as other people's. 
He could not have meant His moral faculties, because they 
were like other men's. So all you can know about the I 
which you conceive to be the Jesus is, that it is another I 
like your own. 

Now, therefore, the bodily Jesus as apprehended by 
men, did not reveal the I which he claimed, because the 
bodily I had a beginning and disappeared just as any other 
/would begin and disappear. But what was the I of 
Jesus that could not be apprehended by the mind of other 
men? From His teachings we may learn that that I had 
no independent existence. It was one with the Father. 
" I and My Father are one." It was the expression of the 
Infinite Intelligence, and that /, no other man, could dis- 
cern. 

But sometimes Jesus used this personal pronoun as 
others use it. "Whom do men say that I, the son of man, 
am?" Now, said Peter, always foremost to speak, some 
say you are the being of John the Baptist, others that of 
Elijah. "But whom say ye that I am?" Peter said the 
I that is real, is Christ the Son of God. " Flesh and blood," 
replied Jesus, " never revealed that unto you. You have 
discovered the truth not through the faculties of reason and 
comparison; my Father, which is in heaven, revealed it to 
you." The real I of Jesus never identified itself with the 
I of the material, mental, or moral man. As often as Jesus 



TIIK TRUE AND THE FALSE I. 67 

was compelled, from a personal standpoint, to address man 
von can perceive a repugnance to the pronoun I. 

Here is a familiar fact. The belief of entity which 
belongs to this pronoun I in the riper years of our sup- 
posed existence does not belong to infancy. The bright 
little thing that is born in your house, that yon call a ray 
of sunshine, looks out upon the world at first with no belief 
in its reality. It does not comprehend things as you and 
I comprehend them, and above all it does not comprehend 
the I. You call the little one, even after you have named 
it, baby, and when it toddles around till w T eary, it says, 
u Mama take bab3^, baby is tired." You call him Willie 
perhaps, and until he is three or four years old he will say 
" Willie is sleepy," and Willie is just as external to the 
real I, to himself as he is to you. He looks out upon the 
error of the belief and calls it Willie just as you do. 

Xow what we would call the personal I of Jesus, he 
calls the son of man. " The son of man is Lord also of 
the Sabbath." Jesus looked out upon what men called 
the Jesus just as your little child looks out upon Willie. 

Your child has no consciousness of the I until he is 
taught the falsehood of being. I think now we have this 
thought. The real I of Jesus was from above. The 
false I was from beneath. Jesus assumed that false I that 
we might be able to catch a perception of the real I. 

Do not let us make a mistake. The man that is repre- 
sented by the pronoun I, as w r e know him to-day, is not 
the perversion of the true man. It is not a false concep- 
tion of the truth. It is not any man at all. It is only the 
belief of a man and there is no believer behind it. There 
is no reality of existence behind your /. It never lived 
and it never will live. I have stated this as the fundamen- 
tal thought of Christian Science. You must reach this 



DO THE TRUE AND THE FALSE I. 

rock and build upon it, and if you build upon any other 
foundation you will certainly go astray from the truth of 
our Lord Jesus Christ. The I of Jesus you plainly see 
had nothing to do with the human body. 

" Ye are of this world, I am not of this world." Jesus 
takes the thought out of the abstract and brings it into the 
concrete. I am not of this world, but you are. You are 
conscious of flesh, of memory, and of action. Jesus had no 
use for a memory. He thought without thinking and 
though He moved around as other men, the reality of His 
being was in the' spiritual I. The visible Jesus was an 
accommodation to sense so we might catch a glimpse of 
the spiritual. The I of the son of God, and the I of the 
son of man are not two entities in the same individual. 
The real I is that of the son of God, spiritual and immor- 
tal, not to be discerned by the false I of the flesh, which 
has no existence except in the belief of it. The true I 
always is. The false I never was; it only as a lie assumes 
to be. 

There is but one more thought which I have to pre- 
sent to you. The spiritual I of being will never be dis- 
cerned as long as the I of sense is assumed to be an entity. 
It is when you come to a perception of the power which 
you have through Christ to destroy the I of sense and to 
know that it is not a reality that the spiritual I will begin 
to appear. There is no possibility that there will not be 
any I. If you could conceive of a man sweeping darkness 
out of a room would it leave nothing in the room ? 

No, it would be immediately filled with light. When 
the false I disappears from sight the spiritual I will come 
into view just as rapidly as the other disappears. The I 
of Jesus, which was the Christ, came to sight as the / of 



THE TRUE AND THE FALSE I. 69 

the material man Jesus disappeared and the true Christ 
was never manifest until Jesus was lost. 

All through the New Testament you w T ill find that 
the great work of the disciples of Jesus w^as to secure the 
destruction of the /. We must mortify the deeds of the 
flesh. We must destroy human thoughts and feelings. 

When this false I is believed to be a nonentity then 
the spiritual / w T ill come to be the all of us. Truth of 
being is found in the death of error and the faith that lays 
hold on the Son of God is bound to believe that there is 
no reality to the son of man. We must reach this point or 
we will never reach Christian Science. 

We will never get to right thinking unless w r e destroy 
that which thinks w r rong. That which sees the wrong, 
can never see the right. It is for you and me to have one 
grand funeral and the corpse that we bear to its eternal 
resting place is the I which says, I have a material body, 
I have powder to love, hate, and be jealous. When that is 
buried the new man Christ will be raised up in us. The 
spiritual man w T ill come to light and God will be known 
because he who know T s will be one w T ith Him. 



THE SAINTS WERE SAVED. 



"But I tell you of a Truth, there be some standing 
here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the King- 
dom of GodP — Luke ix., 27. 

We approach the study of these words with some 
hesitation. The text is an utterance of the Great Teacher, 
who often meant more, but never less than His language 
implied. Jesus was the Man of Prophecy, and never 
shrank from claiming all the functions of the Messiahship. 
He was able to fulfil all that had been written aforetime 
concerning Him. And when Ave seek to fathom His sur- 
prising declarations we shall err exceedingly if we attempt 
to accommodate His meaning to the narrow limits of 
human probability or possibility. There is but one pro- 
phetic personage. Jesus claims to be the only one em- 
powered of God to enlighten the world and work the 
works of righteousness. His demonstrations may there- 
fore be expected to reach to all limits. 

He appeared at the end of the age, or world as the 
English version has it, and we may be sure that the age 
did not end without a demonstration in behalf of His dis- 
ciples, which is beyond the power of expression in the lan- 
guage used by mortals. He had gathered about Him a 
band of faithful followers. These, in the after years, had 



THE SAINTS WERE SAVED. 71 

increased that following to thousands. We call the record 
of their labors inspired scriptures, and watch with breath- 
less interest the varying story of their sufferings and suc- 
cess, their defeats and triumphs to an abrupt termination, 
which is unaccountable when we consider that no definite 
result is reached in the sacred history. 

The work of the Messiah in the world and His labors in 
behalf of His followers, seem at the first and for a consider- 
able time to have been within the comprehension of honest 
and Truth-seeking mortals. The story is told for the most 
part in language which may be accepted without a strained 
interpretation. Its facts are beyond the level of ordinary 
human events, but even the world has consented to receive 
them with the acknowledgement that they may be true, 
though supernatural. But to the thoughtful, who perceive 
that these facts advance step by step, threatening by this 
advance to rise out of the region of the comprehensible, 
the reason for the abrupt termination of the narratives of 
the acts of apostles at last discloses itself. Human lan- 
guage could express nothing more, and the finalities of 
the Gospel must remain unwritten until the discovery of a 
new tongue which would prove adequate to convey the 
history of that which is invisible to mortal sense. The 
Bible ended at the critical point when the work of the 
Messiah w r as transferred from the material to the spiritual 
world. 

The disciples of Jesus desired to know what would 
be the termination of that strange course of thought and 
action into which they had been introduced by their Master. 
"What shall we have therefore," said Peter, who had for- 
saken all earthly things to become a wanderer at the com- 
mand of his Lord. He naturally assumed that a life of 
sacrifice and devotion should have some ultimate reward. 



72 THE SAINTS WERE SAVED. 

The reply of the Master was the promise of royalty in the 
kingdom which He Himself should finally receive at the 
hands of His Father. Very dim conceptions of the char- 
acter of this kingdom crossed the thoughts of the little 
band, nevertheless they accepted the pledge and plodded 
on fully assured, that whatever it might prove to be, the 
kingdom was worth all and more that it might cost them 
to obtain it. They held religiously to the phrase, and as 
it had been in their Master's lips a favorite word, so they 
believed that it covered untold and inconceivable riches 
into the possession of which they would at some future 
time enter. 

The Kingdom of God as the finality of their faith 
was not, in the thought of the disciples to be a very remote 
experience. All critical readers of the New Testament 
perceive that the Church of the Apostles confidently ex- 
pected* that it would be realized within a generation of 
human life. It consequently made no provision for a ma- 
terial future; built no edifices of brick or stone; founded 
no institutions, and moved forward without a plan or pur- 
pose contemplating the continuance of earthly work. 

For this hope of an indefinite something which they 
called the Kingdom, they had much warrant from the 
words of Jesus Himself. The text is one of the strongest 
of the numerous sayings which supported and sustained 
this hope. Note first of all how indefinite it is as a promise 
made by the Leader, "There be some standing here that 
shall not taste of death till they see the Kingdom of God." 
It is a statement wholly negative, and pledges only that 
their reward is so near, in point of time, that death shall 
not have overtaken them all before the Kingdom of God 
shall have appeared. But would these specially favored 
ones who might survive to the date of the appearance of 



THE SAINTS WERE SAVED. 



73 



the Kingdom, taste of death after they had been witnesses 
of its approach? If not, what would become of them? 
What was that Kingdom, and what could be the lot and 
changed condition of those permitted to see and enter it? 
Neither of these questions are answered in the New Tes- 
tament. 

Though the central phrase of the didactics of Jesus, 
He does not venture to define the Kingdom of Heaven. 
It is the burden of the parables, and the Teacher constantly 
makes of it a riddle. The Kingdom of Heaven is like a 
householder ; it is like a mustard seed ; like a pearl ; like a 
treasure; like a net cast into the sea; like many other 
things, but what it is in itself, who can tell ? To His dis- 
ciples He unfolded its mysteries ; but left this Kingdom to 
be apprehended by them according to their ability. And 
the reason for such reticence is not far away. The King- 
dom of Heaven is spiritual, that is to say, invisible. No 
mortal language is sufficient to afford a description. Jesus, 
therefore, did not attempt to describe it. There is no spir- 
itual or invisible language that the human mind can under- 
stand, but from the parables, inasmuch as they involved 
relations and principles which the wise may discern, Jesus 
expected that some spiritual perception would be awaked 
through their study in His faithful followers. 

And if it be impossible to reveal directly things spir- 
itual connected with the Kingdom of God, how could it 
be possible to describe what they would be who should be 
enthroned as its princes ? Neither the Master nor His dis- 
ciples seek to delineate the immortal Man. " Eye hath not 
seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered the heart of Alan, 
the things God hath prepared for them that love Him," 
why, therefore, exjoect a revelation of that which cannot 
be revealed ? All that can be told is on the negative side. 



74 THE SAINTS WERE SAVED. 

We may know what the Kingdom and its princes are not, 
what they may not experience and what they may not be. 
But with this we must at present be content. 

All this is said, that we may perceive, that Jesus com- 
municated to His followers as much of the Divine Truth 
as the human mind could grasp. It is a great deal to ac- 
cept the negative statements of Divine Science. Are we 
ready to believe that some of the disciples of Jesus never 
died? It is folly to ask what became of them, for He 
only can answer this who can describe the realities of the 
spiritual world. 

Death to the mortal thought is a terrible reality. In 
belief none can escape its experience. Jesus conquered 
death for Himself. He also declares that He vanquished 
it in behalf of all His faithful followers. He allowed 
none of them to die while He was present with them in 
the flesh. He pledged them that they should never die 
who continued loyal to Him to the end of the age. No 
man, He asserted, could take His flesh life from Him, but 
He could lay it down of Himself. To His followers He 
gave the same power through the spirit of life. They too, 
under similar circumstances with their Leader, could lay 
down their lives. When their enemies were bent on mur- 
der, they were instructed both by precept and example to 
submit to death, and not to rescue themselves by the 
slaughter of their persecutors. Thus Stephen, the first 
martyr, when the Pharisees would stone him, gave up the 
breath. They counted it all joy if called upon to fill up 
the measure of the sufferings of Christ. " The law of the 
spirit of life which was in Christ Jesus had made them 
free from the law of sin and death." Hence none could 
murder them without their consent. All the faithful 
saints who died, died of persecution by their own submis- 



THE SAINTS WERE SAVED. 75 

sion. They had power over the intercostal muscles and 
could cease to breathe at their own pleasure, if called so to 
.do They who escaped the murderous wrath of enemies, 
did not taste of death. They survived to see the King- 
dom of God. 

Let us not venture to go beyond the words of the 
text. Negatives will staler the human belief more than 
positive statements of spiritual Truth, because the carnal 
mind can interpret the latter as it pleases. Plainly, the 
human mind is required to accept as matter of fact, that 
some of Jesus' personal disciples never died. It is conceded 
that to believe this implies much and infers more; but we 
are not now concerned with inferences and implications. 
If some of the personal disciples lived until they saw the 
Kingdom of God, how much larger a proportion of their 
disciples must have survived to the same date. 

The oroofs of a negative must themselves be neg-a- 

J. o o 

tive. And as we have seen from the general tenor of the 
language of Jesus, His disciples had come into the hope of 
escaping death. They build up their faith and make their 
statements upon this assurance. We may assert that their 
hopes were illusive and that they never realized that they 
had misconceived the teaching of the Master. But it remains 
that they were His companions, and grew in the understand- 
ing of all mysteries, and as their understanding developed, 
their hope of escape from death increased rather than 
diminished. 

The sepulchers of the founders of a religion are usu- 
ally sacred, and guarded jealously. The apostles of Jesus 
are regarded as the heads of Christianity, and when they 
died, if their death is claimed, were leaders of a numerous 
body of believers, but no tomb of an apostle is now shown. 
The place in Rome, where Paul is supposed to have been 



76 THE SAINTS WERE SAVED. 

beheaded, is not an exception. The sepulchres of kings 
and prophets back in the remotest periods, are still pointed 
out — the tombs of Rachel, David and Elisha are still ven- 
erable spots, but no devotee can kneel where Peter, James 
or John were buried. 

The Christian Church, founded by the twelve in Pal- 
estine, numbered many thousands of converted Jews. The 
sacred annals leave them scattered in the cities and towns 
of Samaria, Gallilee and Judea, waiting for the fulfillment 
of certain promises. 

Profane history records, that after a short interval, 
dating from the abrupt close of the inspired narrative, a 
terrible insurrection broke out in the Holy Land. It was 
accompanied with scenes of the direst confusion and mis- 
ery. It resulted in the utter destruction of the nation, its 
capital and temple. The remnant of the people spared by 
the sword were carried captive and sold as slaves among 
all the nations of the Roman world. But what became of 
the great Church of the Apostles? History makes no 
reply. Ecclesiastical writers, in a single line, remark, 
that according to tradition, the church fled from the great 
tribulation and took refuge in a little village called Pella. 
It is to be noted that no christians, worthy of being called 
such, were discovered afterward in that obscure town. 

Jesus predicted this tribulation and forewarned His dis- 
ciples of its grievous character. He also instructed them 
in a mode of escape. They were to be in the Holy City 
from the commencement of the insurrection. They were 
to tarry therein without fear until they saw the Holy place 
desecrated as predicted by Daniel, the prophet. Then 
they were to flee upon the housetops and along the walls 
and make a hasty escape to the mountains. Immediately 
after the tribulation should have ceased, they were taught 



THE SAINTS WERE SAVED. 77 

that they should sec the kingdom of God, and thus escape 
death. In I lis outline of the events, the prophet, Daniel, 
was informed, that from the date of the desecration of the 
temple to the end of the tribulation, there would be a 
period of 1,290 days. And he was further assured that he 
himself should stand in his lot at the end of 1,335 days. 
Daniel wrote more than five hundred years before his pre- 
dictions reached their fulfillment. Did all the bystanders, 
to whom Jesus addressed our text, taste of death, or did 
some of them survive to see the Kingdom of God ? 

The negative statements of Christian Science are the 
great stumbling blocks to the human mind, because they 
involve a denial of the forces which act within the bounds 
of material law. Christians of all sects will readily 
assent to the proposition that the Apostolic Church are 
now with their Lord in the Kingdom of God. They 
would, however, strenuously deny, that some of them 
never tasted of death. It is through the unlimited freedom, 
which each personality is supposed to possess, of conceiv- 
ing as he pleases of spiritual things and the means of ob- 
taining them, that imaginary states of disembodied men- 
tality become the Kingdom of Heaven, and death the door 
of admission therein. Hence the denials of Jesus will not 
be received when His assertions seem to be cordially ac- 
cepted. The former are addressed to the mortal thought 
of men with the intent that belief in the material world 
and its laws may be weakened, and the carnal mind itself 
thus rendered less masterful. The latter are to be appre- 
hended by the spiritual perception, but when interpreted 
ideally, are assented to without understanding. 

There can be no apprehension of the spiritual while 
the material fills the field of vision. The work of the 
Christ is not perceived, in its faintest traces, by him, who 



78 THE SAINTS WERE SAVED. 

believes that physical death is the gateway of immortality. 
They who conceive of the Apostolic Church as having 
entered into the ineffable glory, by the separation of mind 
and body, and the survival of the mind under the synonym 
of immortal soul, reduce the work of Jesus to zero, and 
accord to His disciples no advantage over those of Plato. 
It must be seen that these negative postulates are anterior 
in faith and necessarily so, to positive spiritual statements. 
He, therefore, who cannot accept that the disciples of Jesus 
escaped death, cannot follow the Master another step 
toward the Truth of Life and immortality. Though it be 
a mere negative, and fails to declare what should become 
of those who would not die, unless it be received into the 
open thought, we cannot follow the teacher. 

The New Testament saints grew daily toward im- 
mortality. The bonds of sin and laws of the fleshly mind 
became weaker and weaker. Their growth toward the 
spiritual consciousness finally delivered them from any 
belief or perception of death. Death was abolished. But 
no statement to this effect can be received by the human 
mind. 

The world has nothing in the Christ, and can see 
nothing in the Christ language. The things of God are 
spiritually discerned. Hence, he who w T ould seek the 
Truth, must begin where the student began under Jesus. 
He must let these denials of the Master sink into his heart. 
If he believes them they will prove to be agents for the 
destruction of error. We will not ask what became of 
those who did not die. The lesson is sufficient for to-day 
that they did not taste of death. Death had no dominion 
over those who learned how to escape from his clutches. 
Death, therefore, is not a necessity. It is not the appoint- 
ment of God. It has no real dominion. 



THE SAINTS WERE SAVED, 79 

The illumination of Truth is coincident with the de- 
nial of error, Jesus was a man visible to sense for a period. 
The world could watch Him, scan His apparent manhood, 
and draw its own deductions concerning His character up 
to the point of what it calls His death. Thence He passed 
out of the world's apprehension. It never beheld Him 
again. His disciples were illuminated, and they declare 
that He rose from the dead. No others ever saw Him 
after He was laid in the sepulcher. Had Pilate or the sev- 
enty elders who condemned Him, been present at the tomb 
with Mary and the disciples on the morning of the resur- 
rection, they would have seen no Angel, nor heard any 
voice. Their experience would have been limited like 
that of Saul's company on the way to Damascus. They 
would have said there was an earthquake. Had men other 
than disciples stood upon the shore when Jesus dined with 
the fishermen apostles, they would have seen nothing, 
heard nothing of the resurrected one. The carnal Jesus, 
save to those to whom " He showed Himself alive after 
His passion," had given place to the invisible Christ. 

Death, as defined by sense, has nothing to do with 
the spiritualization of man. He does not, through its 
agency, lay aside grosser elements in order to retain the 
finer and more attenuated parts of his being. Nor is such 
a resurrection of body, as human imagination pictures, a 
factor in the work of salvation. The incarnation of a 
Jesus continued up to the point of its necessity to break 
belief in the material laws of life and life's supposed de- 
pendence on material form and organs. 

The death of Jesus confirmed the unbelief of hostile 
mortal mind. His resurrection was an object lesson for 
His disciples alone, to show them the impotence of death, 
and that they might submit to it fearlessly, trusting to the 



80 THE SAINTS WERE SAVED. 

power of the endless life. With the higher illumination 
into which the disciples had grown, through spiritual per- 
ception, they beheld the risen Lord as if still in human 
body, but in body subject now to no law of sense. It re- 
mained for Him to disappear when the lesson was fully 
learned, that death was destroyed and captivity led captive. 

The progress of man out of error into Truth, his 
advancement from darkness into the light, as illustrated by 
Jesus, the Christ, must forever remain invisible to natural 
or carnal perception. All that can be accepted at the out- 
set are the negative statements, which it calls miracles. 
Material forces under natural law cease to act. Sinful 
men are no longer sinners. Sick men cease to be sick, 
and the dead are not dead but asleep. This is all that can 
be apprehended by that mind that will retain itself in a 
false integrity and scan the works of God from the van- 
tage ground of criticism or philosophy. That Jesus lived 
and died a miracle-worker by occult art, was the honest 
conviction of the average observer. 

And the disciples who followed in the foot-steps of 
their Master, and reached, by concealed progress, the same 
ultimate destiny, are still enigmas to the mortal man. By 
what forces they were moved, and toward what goal their 
steps tended, it is useless to inquire until we accept, with 
some degree of conviction, the denials of the Master. 
" They that believe in Me shall never die." " There be 
some standing here who shall not taste of death." 
Language like this must first be accepted before we can 
be prepared to enter upon an investigation of what is 
meant by the Kingdom of God. " The Kingdom of God 
is not meat and drink." It is not in essence and substance 
analogous to anything visible or audible to sense, but rather 



THE SAINTS WERE SAVED. 81 

in character the very opposite of the thoughts which 
Bow from natural mind. 

It will now be evident that the first step toward the 
Truth upon the part of mortal mind, consists in firm denials 
of long cherished convictions of that mind, that it is in 
bondage to evil. This lesson we learn from the Great 
Teacher, and our ability to practice it with effect is in di- 
rect ratio with our confidence in Him as an unerring 
teacher. What He declares not to be the Truth, though 
we have always believed it to be the Truth, we can lay 
aside at his word, if we believe in Him. He knew; we 
do not know ; and when we know not, we must accept the 
word of Him who does know and proves His knowledge 
by His works. " Believe Me for the work's sake." 

To taste of death is an expression which appeals to 
sense and is unequivocal. Jesus used it doubtless that the 
carnal perception might be impressed and astonished, We 
can either believe or disbelieve that His disciples never 
died in the ordinary sense of mortals. If we disbelieve 
and explain his words away, then Ave confirm ourselves in 
the error and false theories, to support which we are com- 
pelled to disbelieve. If we believe, our philosophy of life, 
our conception of being, our interpretation of law, indeed, 
our whole system of theology weakens its hold on our 
faith, trembles and totters, and leaves us in mental states 
deplorable to consciousness, but such as Jesus desired 
should follow as the effect of faith in his words. The 
kingdoms of this world are without foundation in Truth, 
and physical death is one of their fundamental elements. 
When our confidence in them is overthrown, we turn with 
gladness to the revelations of the Christ, by faith in Whom 
we have eternal life. 



JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH. 



" Therefore being justified by faith, we have j)eace 
with God through our Lord fesus Christ" — Rom. z;., i. 

From early infancy we have been taught that men 
are conceived and born in sin, that the natural proclivity 
of the human heart is toward evil, and that few, if any, 
pass through life without actual violation of divine law. 
A mild protest against this doctrine of total depravity has 
been made in this last century, principally upon the part of 
that body of christians known as Unitarians. The force 
of their declaration that children, properly educated and 
guarded from temptation, might develop inclinations 
toward good rather than evil, has been felt among all 
denominations to such an extent as to make it a question 
of doubt whether all men are, through the constitution of 
nature, necessarily violators of divine law and thereby ex- 
posed to the penal consequences of actual transgression. 
It is certain that the positiveness with which the pulpit 
formerly asserted the exceeding sinfulness of men and the 
certainty of their endless punishment, if unrepentant, has 
been toned down into much milder utterances. And there 
are not a few in these last days, who have summoned 
courage to assert that humanity has been painted in darker 
colors than it deserved ; and that a more tolerable future 



JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH. b3 

awaited erring men and women than Calvinistic preachers 
were wont formerly to allow. 

It cannot be denied, however, that both the Old and 
the New Testament assume the fact, that mortal man is 
somehow an evil being, and as such, is destined to en- 
counter consequences, which, if not averted, will involve 
him in a future condition of misery, more or less pro- 
tracted, and, for the most part, the consciences of men 
are in accord with the Bible teachings. Few of us, if we 
would speak honestly from the heart, would assert our 
own righteousness, or express a sense of deserving a blessed 
or joyous destiny. Our fears of the future and what that 
future may bring to us of wretchedness, either as the con- 
sequences of our sin through natural law, or by the inflic- 
tion of a higher power, are not as vivid as men formerly 
experienced, but they still remain, and constitute no small 
element of human unhappiness. Upon all peoples, who, 
in past centuries received the Hebrew Scriptures as a divine 
revelation, this fear settled down like a cloud. The Jew 
himself was tormented by it, and it was the chief element 
of his religion, how to appease the divine wrath and thus 
escape the penalty of transgression. From the third to 
the seventeenth centurv the Christian world was oppressed 
by a terrified conscience that left it no peace. Its cry was 
continually " what must I do to be saved?" Sacrifices of 
animals, in the Hebrew worship, penance, pilgrimage and 
self torture among the Christians were modes designed to 
find relief from the burdened conscience, and allay the 
fears of hell. 

Twice in human history a mysterious mode of deliv- 
erance for the sinner has been proclaimed. Once by 
Jesus and His disciples, doing away with sacrifices, and 
subsequently by Martin Luther, lifting from the shoulders 



84 JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH. 

of men the burden of penance and self torture. This 
mode of deliverance is theologically named the doctrine of 
" Justification by Faith," and we propose to examine it 
briefly in the light of Christian Science. 

To justify is to make just, to restore a sinner to the 
condition of innocence, and to make him who has been 
convicted of violation of law such a one as he who never 
has transgressed the commandments of God or man. At 
first sight this seems an impossibility — a wild waste of 
of words, and when the means by which this is to be 
accomplished are stated to be " by faith in the Lord Jesus 
Christ," we are more astonished, that such a doctrine 
should ever have been accepted, and that it should have 
brought consolation to the minds of millions. It is the 
central thought to-day of evangelical religion. It pos- 
sesses a strange power, which seemingly can not be over- 
come, and lies at the basis of all religious hope. It would 
regenerate the world if the world would receive it, and our 
hope is that in the new light men may so apprehend it as 
to increase its power tenfold. The problem of a sinner's 
justification involves four fearful elements which are to be 
overcome. 

1. The sinful deeds must be made null and void. 

2. The character of the sinner must be changed into 
that of innocence. 

3. The sense of guilt must be removed. . 

4. The consequences of wrong doing must be 
averted. 

Faith in the Lord Jesus Christ implies an understand- 
ing of the truth of being as He saw and taught it. He was 
the divine teacher, and understood what the human mind 
can not of itself discover. He looked upon men from His 



JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH. 85 

Father's, — that is the spiritual side, and in consequence His 
truth was the very opposite of human conceptions. 

He saw very plainly that men and women were mere 
beliefs of flesh and blood, that life in matter is only a 
dream ot existence, and without reality — that words of 
slander were never uttered and acts of lust and deeds of 
violence were never committed save in the false concep- 
tions of a carnal life. His disciples who learned to com- 
prehend the truth and believed in Him, discovered to their 
joy that it was not they who sinned, but that sin did its 
own sinning. They awoke to the perception that there 
was a second self which had no participation in the evil of 
the carnal man, and they rejoiced in the knowledge that 
the words and deeds of a dream life could have no eternity 
of existence. Discarding the belief that the real man 
could be identified with that which never proceeded from 
him they left the records of sin and evil to disappear 
where no divine intelligence could take note of them. 
When they had found refuge in the reality of the Christ 
being they knew that their sins and iniquities would be 
remembered no more. 

Thus by faith the students of Jesus were lifted out of 
a sense of guilt. The sinful words and evil deeds of the 
past were not theirs. The awakening of a new conscious- 
ness separated them from the old self. The spiritual man 
shook off the claim of the carnal man. The body of flesh 
and blood and the mind which through it was involved in 
transgression became dead to their new perception. They 
lived a new life which was by faith in their Sonship to 
God. They were new men in Christ Jesus. Old things 
had passed away. This obliteration of the things of sense 
from the realm of reality, and the transfer of consciousness 



86 JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH. 

from the carnal to the spiritual ego are the great elements 
of the doctrine of justification by faith. 

In human belief he that speaks falsely of his neigh- 
bor to his hurt, is a slanderer. He that corrupts his neigh- 
bor's wife is an adulterer. He that purloins his neighbor's 
goods is a thief, and he that takes the life of his fellow men, 
a murderer. In human judgment, thus, words express a 
belief of character. For the most part this character 
is indelible. True, the thief may restore what he has 
taken, the slanderer recall his words and make amends, 
and thus both may retrieve themselves, and in human 
thought the characters of thief and slanderer may be de- 
stroyed. But the adulterer and murderer must stand for- 
ever exposed to obloquy in the judgment of carnal man, 
because they can neither undo the wrong nor make 
amends. The consequences of their sin are eternal. The 
adulterer and murderer must remain sinners so long as the 
sin remains, and how can either be justified while the 
chastity of one victim and the life of the other are not 
restored? On the human plane and within the scope of 
human justice this is impossible. If you believe that the 
carnal thought reflects the divine judgment you must be- 
lieve that the murderer is always a murderer, and that 
innocence of crime can never be predicated of such a one. 
He can never become a just man-, even by implication. 
But does the universal verdict of mortal mind correspond 
with the revelation of divine judgment as made by Jesus 
the Christ? Men who are morally good and personally 
righteous abhor the character of the criminal. They 
stand in holy horror in the presence of the incestuous and 
murderous. Crime shocks them, and they are repelled as 
by a being of a loathsome order. But was Jesus thus 
stirred by feelings of abhorrence? Was He repelled by the 



JUSTIFICATION 1JY FAITH. 87 

perception of the horrid character of the sinner? Did lie not 
'unite men to Him with the tacit understanding that He 
could remove their guilt and restore the sinner to inno- 
cence? It would not be the truth to say that lie made 
light of sin, excused vice, or palliated crime, but it would 
be true to say that He perceived, as mortal man cannot, 
that sinful character could be destroyed, and that the sinner 
himself was not the reality of being he deemed himself to 
be. The carnal sinner condemned himself because the 
carnal mind of his fellows condemned him, but Jesus did 
not condemn him. It is carnality that sins, not man, and 
sinful character departs before the spiritual light in which 
it is discerned, that the divine love pierces through the evil 
and error of human belief, and recognizes underneath the 
immortal features of its own child. 

We are taught that the words that once are spoken 
can never be unsaid and that deeds cannot be undone, and 
in the law of cause and effect all human actions must have 
their eternal consequences. If this world is the reality 
of being, and its laws are irrevocable, this teaching would 
be true and the sinner could not hope for justification. 
The murderer, who has taken the life of his fellow sinner, 
and by his act of malice has thus not only robbed his vic- 
tim of a life which cannot be restored, but has also 
involved him in the misery of a sinner's eternal doom, can 
not stand a just man before any human tribunal. The 
human mind shrinks indignantly from the thought that the 
murderer may share the joy of the blessed while his victim 
wails forever in the woe of the damned. No penance, no 
remorse, no good deeds however multiplied can be counted 
against the crime whose consequences are without remedy 
or end. Either there must be some wonderful miscon- 
ception of the realities of human being and the laws which 



88 JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH. 

control its destiny, or it is impossible that he who is once 
convicted of sin can ever become an innocent man. He 
who rises to an apprehension of Christ perceives the 
former alternative to be the truth. Sin is a false belief — 
the world in which sin is possible is a false world. Neither 
the sinner nor his victim are real men, and evil itself has 
no existence save in the consciousness of that child of the 
devil which claims to be child of God. There can be no 
perpetuity of evils, for there is no substance to be perpet- 
uated. It is a cloud, a mist, a darkness which the light of 
truth will dispel. Christ the Truth will redeem the world. 
This is the divine decree, and it has gone forth that 
all things shall be put under Him. Now we see the evil 
but not the good. Sin is the only reality to human mind 
and there is no righteousness. Hence the doctrine of total 
depravity. He who beholds Christ and has faith in Him 
learns to see only the good, and when you see the good, 
the evil must disappear. The man can be separated from 
the sinner, and thus separated the man w^ill be justified 
and the sinner condemned. Faith in the Lord Jesus 
Christ w T ill make this separation. When we believe no 
longer in the reality of sin, we will cease to sin. Human 
beliefs are the groundwork of human misery, and the sin- 
ner may emerge from sin, as the sick man escapes from 
sickness by a change of belief. "Justification by faith," 
are golden words, whose value is yet to be tested, not by 
the elect only, but by the race. With the heart man 
believeth unto righteousness, said a disciple of Jesus who 
had been one of the chiefs of sinners, and had escaped by 
the Christly way from a sense of guilt, the stain of sin, the 
fact of transgression and the torments of hell. " Justified 
by faith !" To the men of the world, wise in sense, these 
words are nonsense. To the remorseful sinner they cover 






JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH. 89 

a mystery. To the disciple of Truth they are the wisdom 
and power of God. " Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ 
and thou shalt be saved." But what shall I believe? Is 
the old penitential inquiry, to which Christian Science 
replies: Believe in your spiritual manhood, your sonship 
to the Good, your inherited righteousness, your immor- 
tality of being. Believe in the unreality of the flesh, the 
nothingness of evil, the powerlessness of sin, the empti- 
ness of earthly good, the vanity of pleasure and the mock- 
ery of pain. For all this is the truth, the Christ, which, 
when you have believed, will have separated your sin as 
far from you as the cast is from the west. 



HEAVEN. 



"jfior Christ is not entered into the holy places made' 
with hands, which are figures of the true; but into Heaven 
itself, now to appear in the presence of God for us." — 
Heb. ix., 24. 

The tabernacle of Moses and the temple of Solomon, 
which were fashioned after certain designs given by 
Moses, were built by human hands. The former was for 
the most part constructed of woven fabric; the latter 
embodied the same design in wood and stone and metal. 
Both, says St. Paul, were metaphors which addressed 
the eye. They were visible things standing for the invis- 
ible. As material objects they were not imposing, nor 
particularly mysterious; but in the relation of their parts, 
the names by which those parts were designated, and the 
uses to which they were put; in the ceremonies connected 
with their use, and, above all, in the permanence which 
was sought to be secured both for the structure and its 
uses, there was a mystery which many sought to penetrate 
in vain. An outer court free to the nations, an inner court 
privileged only to the Hebrews, and an inmost enclosure 
lawful for but one man to enter, and for him only on a set 
day, are singular items in the construction of a building. 
An altar of brass, a font of water, a candelabra, and a 



HEAVEN. &1 

gold-covered chest were furniture remarkable for simplic- 
ity, but not otherwise striking. Stated sacrifices of ani- 
mals, burning of incense and of the flesh of the animals sacri- 
ficed, the sprinkling of blood upon this furniture and the 
walls of the apartments, were ceremonies which, repeated 
daily from generation to generation, with no particular 
results of advantage to individuals or the nation, could call 
forth nothing but valueless speculation. 

The time came in the course of centuries when the 
temple, its furniture, and the accompanying ceremonies 
were about to disappear. Some solution of the mystery 
of the whole was given before this disappearance became a 
fact. They who were sincerely desirous of understanding 
the hidden meaning of the Tabernacle learned that its 
mission was accomplished and the things signified by it 
were now revealed, and the student might, if he desired, 
apprehend the things which for ages had been incompre- 
hensible. 

In general, the visible tabernacle, or temple, symbol- 
ized things which were invisible and would so remain 
while the temple continued. The " Holv of Holies," or 
inner tabernacle, stood for the invisible Heaven or home 
of God. The court of the congregation represented that 
condition of mind, or partial apprehension of truth, 
which belonged to those who were freed from the 
superstition of paganism ; and the court of the Gen- 
tiles figured the condition of the world at large, ig- 
norant of all truth. The high priest was a type of 
the true man who would open a way whereby men 
might enter Heaven. The sacrifices, burning of in- 
cense, sprinkling of blood and other offices of the priest- 
hood foreshadowed the means whereby men might pass 
through the outer and inner courts and reach the sanctu- 



92 HEAVEN. 

ary. The symbols were material things — the things typed 
are spiritual things. The former remained until by the 
revelations of the latter their use became valueless. The 
spiritual things came to view, as the symbols were with- 
drawn. The veil of the sanctuary was rent when the 
spiritual sacrifice was offered, and when the earthly temple 
was consumed and the material Holy of Holies was de- 
stroyed, the spiritual Jews entered into the sanctuary not 
made with hands. 

The apostle to the Hebrews writes in the interval be- 
tween the rending of the veil and the destruction of the 
sanctuary. The true high priest had entered into the 
true sanctuary, and was performing the spiritual office 
typed by the sprinkling of blood by the earthly high 
priest. The spiritual Jews were waiting the hour when 
the true high priest should come out and lead in the wait- 
ing throng. 

This could not be while the type sanctuary stood. 
When this was burned, and while wondering eyes watched 
the smoldering embers, the high priest came out of the 
true sanctuary and ushered in the faithful ones, who were 
looking through the signs into the things which they 
signified. The elect, or chosen ones, were admitted by 
the high priest to the presence of Him who was symbol- 
ized by the glory which was above the Mercy seat be- 
tween the wings of its cherubim on the Ark of the Cove- 
nant in the inner earthly sanctuary. 

Truth may be studied in its own light as the Divine 
Science. It may be investigated from the side of error, 
where through things material, signs and symbols, it is 
less distinctly seen. 

The latter way, however, is the beginning. It was 
the way in which the redeemed took their first steps. It 






HEAVEN. 93 

continues to be the way in which the Gentiles are feeling 
after God. There is really no longer need of earthly sym- 
bols. .V new and living way has been opened. But where 
men will seek for life through signs it is important to per- 
ceive that with the disappearance of these a demonstration 
has been made which renders their continuance un- 
necessary. 

Not only has Christ entered the true sanctuary, but 
He has likewise conducted therein His true followers of 
Israel. The Church of the New Testament are with 
their Lord in Heaven. They went in through the open 
veil, or dissolution, of the flesh, for the veil typifies the 
flesh. This is the final fact to be believed by those who 
seek the spiritual through the symbolic. When the Gen- 
tile Christian church shall have apprehended this and ac- 
cepted it, it will be ready to perceive the truth in its own 
spiritual light. Stated in the language which humr.n 
mind demands, it is this: As soon as all symbols were 
destroyed, the church of the Apostles of Jesus Christ was 
translated and. carried to Heaven, where it is with its lead- 
er, in the presence of God. We have no arguments to 
advance in favor of such a statement, for it is an attempt 
to present a spiritual fact in a carnal way. 

Christian Science has no use for such language. It 
is only decisive to the mortal mind, which seeks for the 
eternal things to be revealed on the plane of the material. 
And there is little probability that he who believes in the 
reality of personal being will accept it as a fact that the 
corruptible man put on incorruption, when the earthly 
Holy of Holies had disappeared from physical vision. He 
that uses still material types must take heed that he carry 
not the mortal conception of substance in matter into the 
conception of things these types are supposed to symbol- 



94 HEAVEN. 

ize. Whatever Heaven may be in human thought, as 
shadowed by the inner sanctuary, where Jesus is, who entered 
therein with His own blood as represented by the earthly 
high priest, it is insisted that He came out and ushered 
in His chosen ones to be forever with Him, and that this 
must be accepted in belief, or types will have been inter- 
preted in a mystic, not spiritual, sense, and thus be robbed 
of any real significance. The faithful saints of the New 
Testament are not dead as to their bodies, and alive as to 
their souls in happiness, awaiting a resurrection of the 
dead. They were not saved from sin by the separation 
of soul and bodv: nor are thev in their graves waiting a 
signal to come forth in some remote future day. Through 
the rending of the flesh they have entered into their 
eternal rest. 

Let us look at these svmbols in the higher light of 
Christian Science. There were three courts. The outer 
court, that of the Gentiles, represents the darkness of mor- 
tal mind, without any illumination or perception of spirit- 
ual truth, but waiting for the light. The second court, 
that of Israel, pictures human mind partially enlightened 
bv the perception of the unity of good, the evil of sin, and 
the necessity of deliverance from the life of blood. The 
third or final sanctuary is a picture of the condition of 
man, when the error of mortal thought has entirely disap- 
peared, and the full and clear perception of the good, or 
God, as all in all, has become a reality of experience. 

The high priest's functions are fulfilled in the work 
of the great teacher Jesus, who by laying down His earth 
life and in the shedding of His blood reveals the great 
truth that life and sin in the flesh are falsities of belief, 
and that in the surrender of these and their banishment 
from thought the true life and righteousness appear. He 



HEAVEN. 95 

enters first of all. The elect of Israel follow Him, and 
through all the courts the universal mortal mind is drawn 
irresistibly to follow until Heaven is reached. 

To mortal sense tarrying in the court of the Gentiles, 
Heaven is a place afar off. It is outlined in shadow and 
illumined with material light. God sits upon a throne 
from which issue flashes of vengeance and thunderbolts 
of wrath. His countenance is terrible with fiery bright- 
ness and His form gigantic. Xo man can approach into 
His presence unless he has lived spotless and pure. Swift 
servants do His bidding, and His eye pierces the remotest 
corners of the universe. His ear hearkens to all words of 
sin and crime, and his memory treasures all deeds of vil- 
lainy. He is a being greatly to be feared, and His domain 
is canopied with awful terror. 

When mortal mind has entered the court of Israel, 
Heaven becomes the home of the righteous. They may 
enter there who have kept the law, who have curbed the 
tongue from evil words and restrained the hand from 
deeds of violence and wrong; who have atoned for sin by 
acts of penance or sacrifices of pleasurable desires; who 
have trained a conscience to a sense of obligation to do 
what is enjoined in the law, or to avoid doing what is 
forbidden in ordinances. To them God is merciful, 
though just. He can be placated by prayers and supplica- 
tions. He can lay aside His wrath and smile. His throne 
still stands, and He is majestic in visage and grand in out- 
line. Heaven remains a place floored with clouds and 
arched with space. Strains of music swell before the 
throne and roll away into infinite regions or steal back in 
echoes from the empyrean. Angels guard the gates and 
admit those favored by priestly intercessions. Purified bv 
ceremonies and clothed in while, the favored few walk 



96 HEAVEN. 

the celestial paths and join in the eternal chorus of praise 
and adoration. 

To those who stand in the porch of the inner sanctu- 
uary, Heaven is the consciousness of eternal being, of spirit 
as the substance of man, of good as the only reality, of 
harmony as the law of the universe. Heaven is the per- 
ception of health, courage and strength, of virtue, right- 
eousness and holiness, of purity, peace and joy, to be spir- 
itual thoughts embodied in spiritual man as the manifesta- 
tion of the infinite good. To them God is the life, the 
mind, the soul, the truth, and the spirit of man. Heaven 
is immortality with the thought of sin, or sickness, or 
death forever forgotten. It is oblivion to a world of mat- 
ter wherein sense and a mortal mind have painted false 
pictures of evanescent pleasure, or drawn dark lines of 
sorrow, suffering and woe. It is an awaking from the 
finite into the infinite, the dispelling of a nightmare, the 
death of delirium. 

Christ hath entered therein. He is the type man. 
His priestly work was to assume the errors of mortal 
thought and show them to be falsities; to break the fet- 
ters of sin and reveal its weakness; to grapple disease 
and cause it to disappear; to throttle death and destroy it 
in human thought. He offered as a willing sacrifice what 
error. called himself, the mind, the soul, the life, the blood, 
the being which was born of man, to show that with 
every sacrifice of error's self He gained a lineament of a 
self which was immortal and divine. He entered Heaven 
only in a human sense. He departed from earth only as 
the sun sets; earth receded from Him. The elements of 
evil melted away and left the immortal embodiment of 
the spiritual man invisible to sense. 

He entered to appear in the presence of God for us. 



HEAVEN. 97 

All the disciples of Jesus unite in the clear perception that 
their Master did nothing for Himself. All that He seemed 
to be and do was in the behalf of others. Presenting 
Himself in the guise of flesh and blood, He was seemingly 
a sinner, and subject to misfortune and unhappiness like 
His fellows. He did not seek deliverance and give Him- 
self to the work of redeeming Himself. He never resisted 
evil, or sought to escape it. He apparently submitted and 
allowed His enemies, natural and human, to do their worst. 
It is usual to say of Him that He passed through all the 
stages of human life and through all the phases of human 
experience as do we, and afterward that He ascended into 
Heaven. This is well and allowable, but it is an advanced 
thought that Jesus did not live in the flesh for Himself, 
nor suffer for Himself, nor die for Himself. All this was 
for us. He ascended up into Heaven for us likewise, and 
not for himself. We think of ourselves as away from 
God and out of Heaven. But He was never away from 
His Father and never out of Heaven. He seemed to be 
so only for our sakes. The Christ is in no place with 
limits and topography. There is no here or there except 
in false belief. He seemed to be present and to depart as 
an accommodation to the feeble perception of His follow- 
ers. The Christ is everywhere, where He is apprehended, 
as are now His saints, and he who perceives the Christ is 
in Heaven. We neither go to Heaven nor does Heaven 
come to us; we make our Heaven. 

The entrance of Christ into Heaven is a statement 
in which material language is used to express a spiritual 
thought. It is founded on an assumption that human 
thought is only partially in error. It does not deny that 
' the true sanctuary is a sanctuary, from which man is shut 
out by a veil. It seemingly admits that by some kind of 



HEAVEN. 



transition the spiritual priest Christ Jesus did pass from 
earth to another place of which the earthly sanctuary was 
a pattern. We should learn from the symbolism a higher 
lesson than that which can be drawn from analogies. The 
veil is the flesh. Man believes he is flesh and blood. If 
man is flesh and blood, he is thereby out of the sanctuary. 
When he is not flesh and blood, but is man still, he is in 
the sanctuary. He does not pass from place to place, for 
spiritually there is no place in the sense of locality. Jesus 
was able to surmount the idea of man as flesh and blood. 
And when He dismissed the thought of the flesh as sub- 
stance and essential to being, He was spiritual. This is ex- 
pressed materially by saying that He ascended into Heaven. 
He did not leave the body by passing out of it, but the 
body disappeared. False thought is the creator of the 
body. When the creator is gone the creation is no longer. 
And when Jesus had illustrated and demonstrated that 
the laws of the body and the evils of the body were not 
realities of being, there remained the final work, to be done 
for us. The body and the blood must be destroyed. They 
must disappear from thought. He carried them out of 
the sphere of mortal apprehension, and by so doing left 
nothing to be considered as the man but the invisible idea. 
His priestly work was, therefore, to make one sacrifice, 
and make it once for all. The carnal man, the man of 
flesh and blood, was laid upon the altar, consumed and 
destroyed. From the world of sight, of sense, and per- 
sonal fellowship, Jesus passed into the spiritual tabernacle 
— into Heaven — for us. Had He left His body and His 
blood behind Him, to be embalmed like Egyptian kings, 
or entombed as were the martyrs, He would have entered, 
not Heaven, but the shadowy realm of Hades \ and that 
for Himself, not for us. 



HEAVEN. 99 

Immortality is reached by the sacrifice of flesh and 
blood, and this not upon an altar of stone, but in the per- 
ception that our life never was of blood, but is hid with 
Christ in God. 



THE EUCHARIST. 



Then ycsus said unto them, verily, verily I say unto 
you: Except ye eat of the flesh of the son of man, and 
drink His blood, ye have no life in you. 

Whoso eateth My flesh and drinketh My blood hath 
eternal life; and I zvill raise him up at the last day. 

He that eateth My flesh, and drinketh My blood, 
dwelleth i?z Me and I in him. As the living Pat her hath 
sent Me and I live by the Father, so he that eateth Me 
shall live by Me. — John vi., 53, 54, j6, 37. 

The constant but seemingly aimless journeyings of 
Jesus, brought Him into close and intimate relations with 
all classes of His countrymen. He caught their thoughts 
and apprehended their mental attitudes with more than the 
skill of a mind reader. He did not need that any should tell 
Him the purposes and motives of the bystanders, " for He 
knew what was in man." The bigotry and false right- 
eousness of the Pharisees whether about to display them- 
selves in the synagogue or at the feast, were read before 
they uttered their voices. The treachery of Judas, the 
sinister motive of Simon who had invited him to supper, 
the marital history of the Samaritan woman, the weak 
purpose of Peter in his protest of fidelity, all were as clear 



THE EUCHARIST. 101 

to the penetrating vision of this wonderful man, before 
they made exhibitions of themselves as they subsequently 
became to a more obtuse observation. A single word, the 
play of a feature, the slightest act, revealed to the Master 
all that was passing in the minds of His disciples. When 
He would make test of His followers, He did not need to 
expose the falsity of their profession, or the emptiness of 
their devotion ; He could always say the word which would 
reveal the insincerity or the self-love, which had led some 
to profess to be His disciples. 

The words which we have chosen as our text, display 
a wisdom which could not come from human mind. They 
served a double purpose. As setting forth a requisite for 
discipleship, the careless, straggling followers who were 
attracted by the unearned bread of miraculous production, 
were staggered at once by their utterance, and deserted 
Him as men would the leadership of a fool, or the cap- 
taincy of a lawless man who would put his troops upon a 
diet of human flesh. His earnest and chosen companions 
wondered at the strange words of hideous import, but had 
confidence enough to know that they covered meaning 
which the Master, or time, or deeper insight would event- 
ually disclose. Having trusted Him and given up every- 
thing for His sake, they were not disheartened at His say- 
ings, however obscure their sense or impracticable they 
might seem in their observance. 

The underlying thought of the true followers of Jesus, 
and that which constituted the first element of discipleship 
was, that He was the Messiah, the hope of Israel — the 
anciently predicted and long expected King who was to 
build up the throne of David and exalt the fallen fortunes 
of the Hebrews. This was the faith of the twelve and 
the few women who were ever ready to minister to Him, 



102 THE EUCHARIST. 

What their conception of His character was, and what 
their notion of the kingdom to be established by Him 
must have been, was clearly evident to Jesus. They had 
heard the prophecies read in the synagogues, and were to 
some degree familiar with the explanations of them as 
made by the rabbi and doctors; and in consequence their 
faint conceptions were all in the lines of error and 
materiality. Jesus was David's royal son, and would in 
some indistinct future time be the King of the Jews. Their 
master had so said, and they believed Him. He had like- 
wise promised the twelve a share in His kingdom, so that 
at His coronation they anticipated a royalty to be bestowed, 
which would make them princes of the tribes. 

The one single conception of truth that these ignorant 
men had drawn from the scriptures as expounded by the 
rabbi, was that the Messiah when He should appear w r ould 
be immortal. This the twelve believed from the begin- 
ning. The miraculous conception of the Jesus had been 
accepted as a fact, and they looked upon Him as a being 
of a different order from themselves. His declaration that 
He must die was an offense to Peter's faith in his Mes- 
siahship. Nothing but the promise of His resurrection 
could appease their opposition to a belief that it was possi- 
ble that He could be subject to the fate of common men. 
The teacher had no groundwork apparently, on which to 
work in the minds of His disciples, except this dim thought 
of their Master's exemption from the power of death. In 
many a sentence He made known the reality of His being, 
and in many a parable He revealed the character of His 
kingdom, but the words had no meaning at the time of 
their utterance to their dull comprehension. They were 
to remember them, and discover their meaning when He 
should be seen no more by them. In the meantime He 



THE EUCHARIST. 103 

taught them on the low ground of their understanding, 

and the question of questions which lie desired should be 
awakened was this: If they believed that lie the king 
was an immortal man, and they, His disciples, were to be 
participants of His throne, how could this be, seeing that 
they would die and thus be separated from Him. An im- 
mortal king with mortal princes was an impossibility. 
Hence the question of unending life, and how it might be 
secured was adroitly thrust upon the infantile thought and 
answered by the teacher after a manner which could be 
satisfactory only so long as the disciples' thought lingered 
around the Son of Mary and recognized the Son of Man, 
as the Son of God. 

Did the ignorant fishermen of Gallilee speculate or 
reason among themselves in accordance w T ith their one be- 
lief concerning their singular leader? " This Jesus whom 
we are following will some day be king over all the lands. 
He will reign forever, we have been taught from out the 
phrophets. He can not die of disease. His enemies can 
not kill Him. No accident can befall Him. He will 
never grow old, never become weak or infirm, never pine 
away. He promises us princedoms in His kingdom, but 
we are mortal, may be attacked by disease, or killed by 
accident or design. Surely He is different in nature from 
us. As He is divine, we are human." How could they 
conceive of immortality like His becoming theirs? 

Call to mind the unconscious beliefs of the carnal man 
concerning himself as found among all peoples. The sub- 
stance of man is flesh; his life is blood. The nature of 
man is changed only as his life and substance are changed. 
To Peter and James the flesh and blood of Jesus to be ex- 
empt from death must be unlike their flesh and blood 
which was consciously subject to mortality. 



104 THE EUCHARIST. 

To the Jew more than any other belongs the thought, 
that the character of man can be moulded by drink and 
diet. By eating unclean flesh he becomes unclean; by 
drinking impurity, he becomes impure. So his Moses has 
taught him. He that eats pork becomes swinish. And 
what other thought could possibly penetrate these low T 
minds of his Jewish followers than this ; — that he who 
would become immortal in his person must feed on im- 
mortal flesh and drink deathless blood ? No other means 
of securing a perpetuity of being with their Lord could be 
apprehended than that of a transformation of their flesh 
and blood into substance identical with those of His; and 
this transformation could be effected in no other way than 
by eating His flesh and drinking His blood. " Except ye 
eat of the flesh of the son of man and drink His blood ye 
have no life in you." To fasten this thought of the neces- 
sity of immortality in order to enter the prophetic king- 
dom of God, and to lead that thought into a higher con- 
ception of the mode of transformation, by which the mor- 
tal may become immortal, seems to have been the design 
of that remarkable institution called " The Lord's Supper." 
Bread was blessed and given to each disciple to eat, with 
the solemn declaration that its substance was the body of 
Jesus. 

Wine consecrated was given them to drink with 
the assurance that it was the blood of Jesus. And what 
other thought could have been present to the minds of the 
twelve, than that in thus eating the body of Jesus and 
drinking His blood, they would become by some mys- 
terious assimilation like their conception of Him ; imper- 
ishable, in their bodily substance, and undying in their 
blood life? They had been witnesses of so many of His 
wonderful works, that no room for doubt remained respect- 



THE EUCHARIST. 105 

ing the verity of the change of the bread and wine into the 
substance and life of His body and blood. 

With such a faith, that by invocation the bread and 
wine were transformed into the body and blood of their 
Lord and that by eating and drinking of these, their own 
bodies were becoming imperishable, and their blood undy- 
ing it is not to be wondered at that the memorial feast 
became a sacrament — a sacred observance the neglect of 
which imperiled their immortality. Do w T e say that this 
conception of the mode of gaining eternal life was grossly 
sensual and material? We must perceive that it was 
strictly in accord with their conception of eternal life as 
manifested by these as yet unenlightened men. It was much 
to believe, that the personal Jesus could not die. Never, 
before had a group of men such an exalted view of their 
leader — and it was wise, infinitely w T ise, for that leader to 
instruct his followers in words which would have been 
true even on the lowest plane of apprehension and which 
continued true to the highest. These unthinking men 
could not distinguish the Son of Man from the Son of God. 
They could not put a meaning as yet behind the words, 
that " flesh and blood could not inherit the kingdom of 
God." To them there was no other man conceivable but 
the carnal man, and no immortality other than the unend- 
ing continuance of life in flesh. No other mode of gain- 
ing immortality, therefore, was possible to their conception 
than that of becoming one in substance with Him over 
whom death could have no power. 

With the sensual idea of eating and drinking, is asso- 
ciated, necessarily also, the thought or belief of the destruc- 
tion of that which is thus consumed. If by consecration, 
the bread was changed into the bodily substance of their 
Master, and the wine into His blood, then would they, at 



106 THE EUCHARIST. 

the last, have eaten and drunk His person and He would 
have been lost in them. Another phase of truth which 
Jesus put in these words: " He that eateth my flesh and 
drinketh My blood, dwelleth in Me and I in him." Not 
long could the material sense of this language satisfy the 
thought of those who sat at the board whereon was 
spread the bread and wine. That we have eaten and 
drunk our Lord, and He is lost in us or w T e in Him, and all 
personality has disappeared, was not what these men 
coveted, but it was what their master desired to teach. 
He knew that all error of beiief would destroy itself, and 
foresaw that when in the continued sacrament they 
had consumed the carnal Jesus, they would begin to dis- 
cover their Spiritual Lord, the Son of God. This was the 
manifest intent of the institution of the Lord's supper, — a 
mode of gradually destroying in thought the low concep- 
tion of a carnal man as the Son of God, and the redeemer 
of a world from error. 

The eucharist was not like the feasts of the Jews un- 
der the old covenant, a perpetual memorial. The disci- 
ples were to observe it only during the absence of their 
Lord. Paul says its object was to show the Lord's death 
until He came again. It was for a time faithfully observed, 
and with the hope that through its efficacy, the faithful 
ones were becoming bodily immortal. But as this beiief 
became more and more inconsistent with the other remem- 
bered words of the absent teacher their understanding be- 
came enlightened, and they discovered that the sacrament 
had been instrumental in the destruction of the carnal 
thought, and the means of revealing to them that their 
Christ would return to them, not as a bodily Jesus, but 
as the Son of God, invisible to sense. 

Eating the body and drinking the blood of their Lord 



THE EUCHARIST. 107 

took on at the last its spiritual significance. It came to 
mean the discernment that the body of the real Jesus was 
spirit and not flesh, that His life was God and not blood, 
and that the real bodies of His disciples were in like man- 
ner spiritual and their life eternal. u As I live by the 
Father, so he that eateth me shall live by me." The 
eating and drinking was perceiving that they, the disci- 
ples of Jesus, were of one substance in body with the 
Christ, and of one life with Him whom erstwhile they 
had believed to be immortal through His blood. This 
perception of the early church when reached was the 
second advent of the Lord. It was then that they dis- 
covered Him present with them spiritually, as at the begin- 
ning they had seen Him carnally. Then the symbolism 
of bread and wine, — the faith of their transformation into 
flesh and blood, was forever laid aside. They knew Jesus 
no longer after the flesh. They saw no immortality in the 
human body. They had risen with Him from the death 
of the carnal mind and they knew this world no more. 
The vision of a Jesus from carnal infancy passing 
through all stages upward until lost in the invisible spiritual 
manhood, types the progress of the New Testament 
Church from the lowest mortal conception to that of 
spiritual realization. The vision of the church of the dis- 
ciples, lost at last to mortal view, fairly represents the 
Christian Church of the centuries. This church began 
with the gross view of the Gallilean fishermen. It held 
long and tenaciously to a personal Jesus, thought only of 
immortality as manifest in outlined body visible to sense, 
and sought to gain that immortality by transformation of 
the substance of that physical body. In the early centu- 
ries it reinstated the sacramental supper, partook statedly 
of the consecrated wafer and wine, and declared that com- 



108 THE EUCHARIST. 

municants were through mystic chemistry, made partakers 
of the divine nature. Its doctrine of trans-substantiation 
in which it was held that the bread and wine became 
through consecration the very body and blood of the Lord 
Jesus, and that in consequence the communicant invisibly 
fed on his crucified Lord, was for generations one of the 
essentials of orthodoxy. Human reason after a time 
revolted at language which savored of cannibalism. The 
flesh and blood of Jesus could not, unless miraculously 
multiplied, endure the consumption of ages. He must in 
His personality have been devoured. 

The idea of consubstantiation, which avers that the 
elements are invisibly changed, not into the identical sub- 
stance of the body and blood of Christ, but into a like sub- 
stance, displaced for the most part the former doctrine. 
Later still, both doctrines fell, as regards their forms of 
statement, out of use, and though to-day the sacrament 
continues as a part of the worship of the Protestant sects, 
it is difficult to determine what efficacy is now attached 
to its observance. The bread and wine are symbols, we 
are told, of the great sacrifice through which the redeemer 
of the world has opened the door of immortality to men: 
but through what mode of appropriation of these symbols 
the benefits of the death and blood of the crucified are 
obtained has come to be vague and indefinable. The play 
of the emotions which is induced by the solemnity of the 
surroundings, and the mysterious formulas used on these 
occasions, seems to be the only result attained or hoped 
for. 

We speak not irreverently, when we say that the 
spiritual perception of the Christian sects has risen above 
any aid which the use of material symbols can afford. 
The doctrine of the resurrection of the body — body visible 



THE EUCHARIST. 109 

to sense, has no longer much hold on the Christian's faith. 
Jesus — the carnal Jesus, has been eaten, his blood has been 
drunk until it has disappeared from view. The church 
has shown His death for ages. The human Jesus as flesh 
and blood crucified and slain, has drifted away from human 
vision as that vision has become more spiritual, until it is 
nearly lost. The son of man is almost entombed in the 
darkness of material error. 

The true Jesus, Savior, Christ, the Son of God, lives 
still, but His life is not blood, and His immortality is not 
in person. " As the living Father hath sent me, and I 
live by the Father, so he that eateth Me shall live by Me." 
The life of Jesus to-day is the life that was His before He 
was born of the Virgin, nay, before the worlds were, and 
he that feeds on His flesh and drinks His blood must dis- 
cern spiritual being and appropriate it to himself. 

The material symbols of the eucharist, belong to the 
childhood of the church. To-day they serve only to bind 
spiritual thought and prevent its expansion toward Life and 
Truth, and Love. In spite of its sacredness due to solemn 
tones, and hoary age, how confusing is the formula: 
" And may it preserve you, soul and body unto everlasting 
life." What soul, what body, will be preserved by drink- 
ing of the symbolic wine? Who would have the sinful 
soul and the fleshly body eternally preserved? Rather let 
it die and depart with the body of the son of man which 
lives no more except in the belief of an erroneous concep- 
tion. 

The Church of the Gentiles, like the church of the 
visible Israel, has shown forth the death of the Lord for 
the allotted time. Its Lord has returned and is ready to 
sit down with his bride at the spiritual feast and drink new 
wine with her in the»kingdom of God. 



110 THE EUCHARIST. 

Here let us apprehend the wise words of our teacher. 
" Christian Science is the Second Advent of Christ" 
He has come again as the Lord of life. Once He said, I 
am the truth and the life. As such He has appeared to 
many. We discern His spiritual body, because we have 
devoured His physical body. We feed on him, in the 
perception that now we live by him as He lived by the 
Father. His life is our life; His body, our body. We 
have become one in substance with Him. He is not car- 
nal but spiritual, and therefore we are not carnal but 
spiritual. The Jesus that was, and was crucified, is 
dead, but the Christ that is, lives, and because he lives, 
we shall live also. u I will raise Him up at the last day." 
The last day has come, and hundreds have been raised to 
newness of life. It is not His flesh, but His words, that 
are meat indeed and drink indeed. 

The coming of the truth is the coming of the Christ. 
We have no longer a personal Jesus. We are no longer 
seeking to be like the sinless Jew of eighteen hundred 
years ago. His fleshly person was not immortal, nor can 
His disciples become immortal in the carnal body by any 
spiritual diet. 

We have therefore dispensed with the bread and wine 
which show no longer to human thought the death of our 
Lord. Our communion is spiritual, and thereby do we 
show that our Christ lives and has appeared the second 
time without sin unto salvation. We have put away — 
far away from our thought the old man with his deeds. 

The light of truth has again shined, but not now 
through the veil of the fleshly Jesus. It is the true light, 
the spiritual illumination, and it will this time enlighten 
all men. The gentiles — nations, shall come to the bright- 
ness of His rising. Men are now to know the Lord as 



mm: EUCHARIST. Ill 

He is, not as He appeared to be when Simon looked upon 
the babe of Bethlehem. Before the Science of Truth all 
false claims will give way. Principalities and powers will 
succumb. The great and the loft}-, will abase themselves 
,and the wise men will come again from afar and bring 
gifts. The leaven will leaven the whole lump. The 
mustard seed will grow into a tree; the world will become 
our Lord's and God will appear as He is, all in all. 






THE REIGN OF SIN AND THE REIGN OF 
RIGHTEOUSNESS CONTRASTED. 



"For as sin hath reigned unto death even so might 
grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life by 
yesus Christ our Lord" — Roin. v., 27. 

Two statements are here placed side by side in order 
that by transfer of thought from one to the other both 
may be the better comprehended. By comparison and 
contrast the force of truths or falsehoods are more clearly 
seen. The differences become obvious by the contrast; 
what they have in common, by comparison. The points 
of agreement in the apostle's two propositions reveal them- 
selves in the word reign, wherein it is inferred that some 
power is in control of the human race, and that this power 
has unlimited dominion. Human freedom can not be 
claimed by man except in a very circumscribed sphere. He 
is, according to his own sense of things, bound down un- 
der a constitution and law of being, and ms power of 
choice must be exercised within that law and constitution. 
Some force reigns, intelligent or otherwise, and it reigns 
so rigorously and effectually that, without exception, all 
men are subject to its rule. 

Men might choose to live on continuously and for- 
ever, but they find themselves compelled, no matter how 



SIX AND RIGHTEOUSNESS CONTRASTED. 113 

unwillingly, to succumb to that power, whatever it may 
be, that brings an end to human existence. No finite wis- 
dom or force will avail against the arbitrary power that 
calls men to obey the universal law. Hence, all will 
admit that mankind is subject to rule, and that there is no 
sense in which it can be asserted that we are supreme and 
a law to ourselves. Both statements assert the fact of a 
governing power and infer its absoluteness and universal- 
ity. It might also be inferred from the use of the com- 
parative words as and so that the two powers named ex- 
ercise their dominion after similar modes, but it will be 
seen, upon elaborate consideration, that there are no differ- 
ent modes of arbitrary power. The character of the reign 
is discovered only in the character of the sovereign, and 
the end or object which the reign effects. 

The points of contrast in the two propositions lie, 
therefore, in the different characters of the sovereign pow- 
ers and the results, respectively, of their reigns. In one 
statement the ruling force is sin; in the other, righteous- 
ness. Death is the result of the reign of the former; eter- 
nal life of the latter. Sin and righteousness are more than 
dissimilar forces. They are opposites. It is natural, 
therefore, that the results of their reigns should be oppo- 
site also. But in the case of the reign of righteousness 
the result we note is eternal life — -life continuous and for- 
ever, — while the result of the reign of sin is death, but 
death undefined and perhaps undefinable. It is possible 
to have some conception of life, because it manifests 
itself, and it is not going too far to assert that eternal life 
may come within our grasp of thought ; but as for death, 
which has no manifestation, no work, no environment, no 
utterance, who shall say what death is? At the best it is 
a negative and without entity. Who, then, can say he 



114 SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS CONTRASTED. 

knows or can conceive of that which is silence, darkness, 
nothing ? 

Righteousness, whose reign is unto eternal life, is 
something, but is not of itself a sovereign power. It is 
the creation or child of principle. Grace, or Love, is the 
principle of righteousness, in the sense that without Love 
there could be no righteousness. It does not claim self- 
existence, and in the exercise of its eternal sway always 
accords to Grace, its principle, the honor and majesty of 
dominion. But what, let us ask, is the principle of sin 
which reigns unto death? It is the creature of nothing. 
It represents nothing. It claims to reign in its own right. 
It sets itself up as the sovereign power of the human 
world, and boasts that when it has effected its object it has 
reduced its subjects to the condition of nonentity. We do 
well to investigate this claim of sin, which is without a 
backer, without principle, and without dependence. Can 
it be that sin is eternal, self -existent, and principle in 
itself? Were it all this, then its reign could not be unto 
death or non-existence. There was a time when sin was 
not, when it made no claim to sovereignty ; and it is the 
dawning hope of mortal man that the time will come 
when it will be dethroned and disappear. But in the 
meantime, what is it? If the opposite of righteousness, 
and righteousness is eternal, must it not be a negative — a 
false thought with no more entity than death? 

But if righteousness acknowledges Grace or Love as 
its principle of being, may not sin, the negative of right- 
eousness, claim hate or malice as its principle? Then 
would the proposition of St. Paul be amended to read " as 
malice hath reigned through sin unto death." Thus we 
would place hatred behind sin and call hatred principle. 
Even the human perception would deny this assumption 



SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS CONTRASTED. 115 

and reject it as abhorrent. We can conceive of Love as 
principle, vaguely, it may be; but as for hatred being 
something self-existent and eternal, manifesting itself 
through sin, this is inconceivable. Even the most rigid 
Calvinism in its conception of the divine wrath never pre- 
sented the hideous thought that malice could be infinite 
principle. Sin, if anything, is not eternal, stands on no 
foundation, was without a creator, and therefore, as divine 
science declares, is without entity or substance, material or 
spiritual. 

The reign of Love through righteousness unto eter- 
nal life is by Jesus Christ our Lord. The reign of sin 
unto death is — by everybody. The truth of one proposi- 
tion is supposed to be proved by universal demonstration; 
of the other, by the experience of a single individual. In 
one instance, at least, the principle, the sovereign power, 
its rule and the result, has been manifested. This mani- 
festation was so made as to enable any mind to discern 
that the reign of sin unto death was not a reality, and that 
the only truth is that Love reigns through righteousness 
unto eternal life. 

The reign of sin unto death is a statement of mortal 
thought, drawn from the teaching of the Old Testament. 
It must also be classed as a theological statement, for in 
the Hebrew or Christian thought alone do we find it used 
to express in a single phrase the central fact of human 
history. When to human perception there were gods 
many, malignant forces were believed to sport with men 
in divers manners, and the nations were filled with fear 
and sought to placate the powers, which seemed to take 
pleasure in human misery. But among those who have 
learned that there are not a multiplicity of deities, and that 
but one intelligence exists independent of man and above 



116 SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS CONTRASTED. 

him, it came gradually to he perceived that the mortality 
of men must be charged to something which would exon- 
erate the single deity from the imputation fcf malice or 
cruelty. Hence the thought of sin; sin, as a sovereign 
power within man, doing its deadly work all unseen; sin, 
reigning in and through the constitution of man as a force 
or tyrant which had been evolved by man himself. It 
must be conceded that this statemeut of the reign of sin 
does seem at first sight to exonerate the Creator of man, 
and to throw the responsibility of his mortality upon man 
himself. But to modern thought, as to that of St. Paul, 
this statement cannot be held as truth, because of the im- 
possibility of conceiving of sin as being other than a nega- 
tive of righteousness. 

Through free agency man is the author or creator of 
his own destroyer, sin. In like manner he could have 
been the creator of his own savior, righteousness. So 
teaches the ancient theology. But where in this theory 
does God come in? What has the Divine Intelligence to 
do either with man's mortality or immortality? Assured- 
ly, nothing. 

The reign of sin unto death is the highest expression 
of the human mind seeking to discover the truth on the 
plane of sense and reason. St. Paul does not object to its 
use. He quotes it as a statement valuable in that it does 
release the Almighty from a causative connection with 
human mortality. It stands at the threshold of the truth. 
If sin is a reality, it is better to conceive of it as a creation 
of man, or even as self-produced, than to ascribe it to God. 
It is better to believe that man is a suicide than to believe 
that God kills him. It is the evident intent of the Old 
Testament to bring the human mind to that conviction or 
outlook which makes the human race responsible for its 






SIX AND RIGHTEOUSNESS CONTRASTED. 117 

own sad fate. The law was given for no other purpose. 
Created misery must cease to accuse the creator before it 
can look to that creator for redemption. Carnal man 
must perceive that death is just and right — that he does 
not deserve to live forever — before he can perceive that 
the spiritual man may inherit eternal life. 

Human thought has all gradations from the prof ound- 
est darkness of error, as it rises toward the light. The 
reign of sin unto death is belief and not truth; a seeming 
not a reality. It is as we have said, the loftiest conception 
of the carnal or false mind. Its destruction in belief 
leaves the other statement to take its place. They can not 
both be true. If sin reigns unto death, then grace does 
not reign through righteousness unto eternal life. If 
grace reigns through righteousness, then sin does not reign 
unto death. The two statements can not express coinci- 
dent facts, because they are contraries. But if it be urged 
that in the text they are so expressed as to lead to the un- 
derstanding that the reign of sin had been a fact in all his- 
tory and that the reign of righteousness had just begun 
we must infer that divine grace or love had from eternity 
been inactive. This would be to say, that God who is 
Love, had not been Love until the time of Jesus, and that 
righteousness had not been righteousness before the time 
of the Apostles. This is not the lofty conception of St. 
Paul. In his thought, truth was eternal. Grace through 
righteousness had always reigned, not indeed in the con- 
ception of the human mind, but in the realities of absolute 
being. The reign of sin had been in the falsity of human 
belief: the reign of righteousness in the conception of a 
true faith. 

The mortal mind must even yet think of God as 
working as personal man works. It will assert of the 



118 SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS CONTRASTED. 

reign of sin that it is an actuality of being, and inquire why 
there is a reign of sin. No reply can be given to this in- 
quiry on the plane on which it is asked. Jesus would not 
reply to such a question. When asked why the man 
whom He restored to sight was born blind, He answered 
in effect that he was born blind in order that he might be 
healed. 

In like manner it might be said that the reign of sin 
appears to be in order that the reign of righteousness 
might come to light. It was in the power of Jesus and 
His disciples to destroy sin as well as sickness, but it was 
not in His power to create righteousness, for righteousness 
is eternal. He could abolish death but He could not origi- 
nate life, for life is infinite — it is God. Jesus brought life and 
immortality to light. He made the truth perceptible 
through demonstration in Himself. 

The scriptures teach the destructibility of sin, in the 
New Testament by positive declaration; in the old by 
figures. On the day of Atonement the high priest con- 
fessed the sins of the congregation and laid them upon the 
head of the scape goat which was driven into the wilder- 
ness, where it might never be found again. To the mind 
of error which holds sin to be a reality, the mode of ex- 
pression used to indicate its unreality once was " and your 
iniquities will I remember no more." What divine intelli- 
gence remembers not, is not. 

The reign of sin is a belief of error to be truth. The 
reign of righteousness is a belief of the truth. The priority 
of the former and the sequence of the latter are in the con- 
ception and faith of human understanding. " Where sin 
did abound grace did much more abound." But where, 
or in what did sin abound or grace much more abound ? 
Only in the conception of the disciples of the truth. Once 



SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS CONTRASTED. 119 

St. Paul had believed himself the servant of sin, sold under 
sin. Afterward he believed that he was a child of grace 
or love. There had been no change of facts in his case, 
but a very great change in belief and this change of belief 
had been effected, by no effort of his, but by the incoming 
of light through Jesus the Christ. He had found that the 
dominion of sin over him, and his slavery to sin and death 
was a falsehood, and he had ceased to believe any longer 
in the statement that sin reigned unto death. Again we 
repeat the axiom of " Science and Health" that " the belief 
of evil is all there is of evil." To believe in the Divine 
*Love is to come into possession of that Love, and to know 
that thereby we have passed from death unto life. 

The belief of carnal mind is the personal man — all 
there is of personal man. And to that belief when edu- 
cated under the moral law r , sin is a frightful reality. To 
break its dominion and free belief from its thrall is the 
work of truth. Personal man has always sought to free 
himself by earnest and prolonged resistance to sin. With 
fancied power of will he has made stern resolves not to 
submit to sin. When these have failed he has summoned 
to his aid the motive forces of reason, interest, happiness, 
consistency, honor, and self approval, and last of all he 
has* made his appeal to an unknown God, and inspired 
himself with the hope of future reward for his resistance 
or nerved himself by a fear of punishment if he should 
relax his effort. All have proved futile. Death has fol- 
lowed after, just as certainly to him w r ho has thus fought 
sin, as to him who has yielded unresistingly to its domin- 
ion. And the reason is, that sin can not be overthrown by 
its own subjects. Sin is a belief without entity. Personal 
man is the child of that belief. The claim of existence by 
both must stand or fall together. Sin will continue while 



120 SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS CONTRASTED. 

the carnal mind continues, and the one will have dominion 
over the other until both are destroyed by the truth. 

Sin reigns through mystery. The carnal mind of 
belief cannot fathom it, can not tell whence it came, or 
what is its nature. It acknowledges itself to be evil, and 
having no creator, and being without constitution or law, 
it bewilders the carnal thought. It has no uniformly de- 
fined aspect but assumes a diversity of guises. It professes 
omnipresence and its baffled subject, the fleshly man, may 
twist and turn and double on his track but can not escape. 

Sin reigns through fear. Its hideousness appals, 
when discerned in some of its most terrible aspects. As 
murder, theft, covetousness, adultery, deceit, strife, hatred, 
and witchcraft, it strikes terror to human belief, and the 
carnal man submits because he has not courage to resist. 
As disease and pestilence it asserts itself to be irresistible, 
and cowed, and broken, its victim bows as to the inevita- 
ble and give up all thought of escape. 

Sin reigns through deceit. It beguiles its slave with 
false visions of pleasure, promises him unalloyed delight in 
the possessions of fame, and power, and riches. It paints 
the false material world with colors that hide its empti- 
ness, and plants in him the vain assurance that his life is 
long and death is far away. 

The truth alone can break this reign of sin. The per- 
ception and belief that man is spiritual and not carnal 
breaks his chains. In the new light of the Christ, sin loses 
all its power and is recognized as a false claim of evil to be 
something real. Personal man as slave, and sin as master, dis- 
appear together when the light of Christian Science dawns 
upon the spiritual vision. 

Grace reigns through righteousness unto eternal life 
to every one who perceives this statement to be the truth. 



SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS CONTRASTED. 121 

It is the law of being to the spiritual man, and every man 
is spiritual. The belief to the contrary can not effect the 
truth. Because there is a belief that sin is, and righteous- 
ness is not, does not make sin a reality, or righteousness a 
delusion. The belief that there is a carnal man but no 
spiritual man, does not give substance to the carnal or take 
away the verity of the spiritual man. The belief that the 
universe is material and that there is no other does not give 
being to the material or hinder the spiritual from being 
the eternal creation of God. No harm can befall you in 
accepting as a truth Paul's second proposition. If true at 
all, why not true for you? If grace reigns through right- 
eousness unto eternal life, anywhere, it reigns in the hearts 
of those who accept it as the truth and believe in it. You 
have but to test the truth, to find it true. Accept the 
dominion of grace or love, and the reign of malice is at an 
end. Believe in righteousness, and sin will shrink from 
sight. Have confidence in your eternal life and death 
will be visible no more. 



